Robert Fulton was probably the first American who ever went to Paris for the purpose of selling war-supplies to the French government. Unlike his compatriots of to-day, he found anything but a ready market. For three years, beginning in 1797, Fulton tried constantly but vainly to interest the Directory in his plans for a submarine. Though a commission appointed to examine his designs reported favorably, the minister of marine would have nothing to do with them. Fulton built a beautiful little model submarine of mahogany and exhibited it, but with no results. He made an equally fruitless attempt to sell his invention to Holland, then called the Batavian Republic. Nobody seemed to have the slightest belief or interest in submarines.

But Fulton was a persistent man or he would never have got his name into the history books. He stayed in Paris, where his friend Joel Barlow was American minister, and supported himself by inventing and exhibiting what he called “the pictures”: the first moving pictures the world had ever seen. These were panoramas, where the picture was not thrown on the screen by a lantern but painted on it, and the long roll of painted canvas was unrolled like a film between two large spools on opposite sides of the stage. Very few people remember that Robert Fulton invented the panorama, though only a generation ago the great panorama of the battle of Gettysburg drew and thrilled as large audiences as a film like “The Birth of a Nation” does to-day. Fulton painted his own panoramas himself, for he was an artist before he was an engineer. He made three of them and had to build a separate little theater to show each one in. The Parisians were so well pleased with this novelty that they made up a song about the panoramas, and the street where the most popular of the three was shown is still called “La Rue Fulton.” The picture that won the inventor this honor was a panorama of the burning of Moscow—not the burning of the city to drive out Napoleon, for that came a dozen years later, but an earlier conflagration, some time in the eighteenth century.

Napoleon overthrew the Directory and became First Consul and absolute ruler of France in 1800. He appointed three expert naval engineers to examine Fulton’s plans, and on their approval, Napoleon advanced him 10,000 francs to build a submarine.

Construction was begun at once and the boat was finished in May, 1801. She was a remarkably modern-looking craft, and a great improvement on everything that had gone before. She was the first submarine to have a fish-shaped, metal hull. It was built of copper plating on iron ribs, and was 21 feet 3 inches long and 6 feet 5 inches in diameter at the thickest point, which was well forward. A heavy keel gave stability and immediately above it were the water-ballast tanks for submerging the vessel. Two men propelled the boat when beneath the surface by turning a hand-winch geared to the shaft of a two-bladed, metal propellor. (Fulton called the propellor a “fly,” and got the idea of it from the little windmill-shaped device placed in the throat of an old-fashioned fireplace to be revolved by the hot air passing up the chimney and used to turn the roasting-spit in many a French kitchen for centuries past.) The third member of the crew stood in the dome-shaped conning-tower and steered, while Fulton himself controlled the pumps, valves, and the diving-planes or horizontal rudders that steered the submarine up and down. Instead of forcing his boat under with a vertical-acting screw, like Bushnell and Nordenfelt (see pages 16 and 62), Fulton, like Holland, made her dive bow-foremost by depressing her nose with the diving-planes and shoving her under by driving her ahead. Fulton was also the first to give a submarine separate means of propulsion for above and below the surface. Just as a modern undersea boat uses oil-engines whenever it can and saves its storage batteries for use when submerged, Fulton spared the strength of his screw by rigging the Nautilus with a mast and sail. By pulling a rope from inside the vessel, the sail could be shut up like a fan, and the hinged mast lowered and stowed away in a groove on deck. Later a jib was added to the mainsail, and the two combined gave the Nautilus a surface speed of two knots an hour. She is the only submarine on record that could go faster below the water than above it, for her two-man-power propellor bettered this by half a knot.

Her method of attack was the same as the Turtle’s. Up through the top of the conning-tower projected what Fulton called the “Horn of the Nautilus.” This was an eyeleted spike, to be driven into the bottom of a hostile ship and left there. From a windlass carried in a water-tight forward compartment of the submarine, a thin, strong tow-rope ran through the eyehole in the spike to the trigger of a flintlock inside a copper case nearly full of gunpowder, which was not carried on deck, as on the Turtle, but towed some distance astern. As soon as this powder-case came to a full stop against the spike, the tow-rope would pull the trigger.

Robert Fulton felt the lack of a distinctive name for such an under-water charge of explosives, till he thought of its likeness to the electric ray, that storage battery of a fish that gives a most unpleasant shock to any one touching it. So he took the first half of this creature’s scientific name: Torpedo electricus. Fulton had a knack for picking good names. He called his submarine the Nautilus because it had a sail which it opened and folded away even as the beautiful shellfish of that name was supposed to furl and unfurl its large, sail-like membrane.

On her first trial on the Seine at Paris, in May, 1801, the Nautilus remained submerged for twenty minutes with Fulton and one other man on board, and a lighted candle for them to navigate by. This consumed too much air, however, so a small glass window was placed in the conning-tower, and gave light enough instead. Four men were then able to remain under for an hour. After that, Fulton made the first compressed-air tank, a copper globe containing a cubic foot of compressed air, by drawing on which the submarine’s crew could stay under for six hours. This was in the harbor of Brest, where the Nautilus had been taken overland. A trial attack was made on an old bulk, which was successfully blown up. The submarine also proved its ability either to furl its sails and dive quickly out of sight, or to cruise for a considerable distance on the surface. Once it sailed for seventy miles down the English Channel.

Fulton had planned a submarine campaign for scaring the British navy and merchant marine out of the narrow seas and so bringing Great Britain to her knees, more than a century before the German emperor proclaimed his famous “war zone” around the British Isles. In one of his letters to the Directory, the American inventor declared that: “The enormous commerce of England, no less than its monstrous Government, depends upon its military marine. Should some vessels of war be destroyed by means so novel, so hidden, and so incalculable, the confidence of the seamen will vanish and the fleet will be rendered useless from the moment of the first terror.”

To a friend in America, Fulton wrote from Paris on November 20, 1798:

“I would ask any one if all the American difficulties during this war are not owing to the naval systems of Europe and a licensed robbery on the ocean? How then is America to prevent this? Certainly not by attempting to build a fleet to cope with the fleets of Europe, but if possible by rendering the European fleets useless.”

Fulton began his campaign by an attack on two brigs, the nearest vessels of the English blockading fleet. But whenever the Nautilus left port for this purpose, both brigs promptly stood out to sea and remained there till the submarine went home. Unknown to Fulton, his actions were being closely watched by the English secret service, whose spies were always able to send a timely warning to the British fleet. During the day time, when the Nautilus was about, the warships were kept under full sail, with lookouts in the crosstrees watching with telescopes for the first glimpse of its sail or conning-tower. At night, the frigates and ships-of-the-line were guarded by picket-boats rowing round and round them, just as modern dreadnoughts are guarded by destroyers.

Disappointed by the lack of results, the French naval authorities refused either to let Fulton build a larger and more efficient submarine, or to grant commissions in the navy to him and his crew. He wanted some assurance that in case they were captured they would not be hanged by the British, who then as now denounced submarine warfare by others as little better than piracy. To guarantee their own safety, Fulton proposed that the French government threaten to retaliate by hanging an equal number of English prisoners, but it was pointed out to him that this would only lead to further executions by the British, who had many more French prisoners of war than there were captive Englishmen in France.

Napoleon had lost faith in the submarine, nor could Fulton interest him in a steamboat which he now built and operated on the Seine, till it was sunk by the weight of the machinery breaking the hull in two. So Fulton quit France and crossed over to England, where Mr. Pitt, the prime minister, was very much interested in his inventions.

Fulton succeeded in planting one of his torpedoes under an old empty Danish brig, the Dorothea, in Deal Harbor, in front of Walmer Castle, Pitt’s own residence, on October 15, 1805. The prime minister had had to hurry back to London, but there were many naval officers present, and one of them declared loudly that he would be quite unconcerned if he were sitting at dinner at that moment in the cabin of the Dorothea. Ten minutes later the clockwork ran out and the torpedo exploded, breaking the brig in two amidships and hurling the fragments high in the air. The success of this experiment was not entirely pleasing to the heads of the British navy. Their opinion was voiced by Admiral Lord St. Vincent, who declared that: “Pitt was the greatest fool that ever existed, to encourage a mode of war which they who command the seas did not want and which if successful would deprive them of it.”

Six days after the destruction of the Dorothea, the sea-power of France was broken by Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon now gave up all hope of gaining the few hours’ control of the Channel that would have enabled him to invade England, and broke up the camp of his Grand Army that had waited so long at Boulogne. With this danger gone, England was no longer interested in submarines and torpedoes. So Fulton returned to America, to build the Clairmont and win his place in history. But to him, steam navigation was far less important than submarine warfare. In the letter to his old friend Joel Barlow, dated New York, August 22, 1807, in which he described the first voyage of the Clairmont up the Hudson, Fulton said:

“However, I will not admit that it is half so important as the torpedo system of defense or attack, for out of this will grow the liberty of the seas—an object of infinite importance to the welfare of America and every civilized country. But thousands of witnesses have now seen the steamboat in rapid movement and they believe; but they have not seen a ship of war destroyed by a torpedo, and they do not believe. We cannot expect people in general to have knowledge of physics or power to reason from cause to effect, but in case we have war and the enemy’s ships come into our waters, if the government will give me reasonable means of action, I will soon convince the world that we have surer and cheaper modes of defense than they are aware of.”

Fulton had been having his troubles with the navy department. Soon after his return to this country he had made his usual demonstration of torpedoing a small anchored vessel, but it was not until 1810 that he was given the opportunity to make a test attack on a United States warship. But stout old Commodore Rogers, who had been entrusted with the defense of the brig Argus, under which Fulton was to plant a torpedo, anchored the vessel in shallow water, stretched a tight wall of spars and netting all round her, and successfully defied the inventor to blow her up. Even a modern destroyer or submarine would be puzzled to get past this defense. Though compelled to admit his failure, Fulton pointed out that “a system then in its infancy, which compelled a hostile vessel to guard herself by such extraordinary means, could not fail of becoming a most important mode of warfare.”

It was a great triumph for conservatism—the same spirit of conservatism that threatens to send our navy into its next war with no battle-cruisers, too few scouts and sea-planes, and the slowest dreadnoughts in the world. Though Fulton published a wonderful little book on “Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions” in New York in 1810, the United States navy made no use of it in the War of 1812. A privateer submarine from Connecticut made three dives under the British battleship Ramillies off New London, but failed to attach a torpedo for the old reason: copper sheathing. Further attacks were prevented by the captain of the Ramillies, who gave notice that he had had a number of American prisoners placed on board as hostages. Fulton himself was hard at work superintending the building both of the Demologos, the first steam-propelled battleship, and the Mute, a large armored submarine that was to carry a silent engine and a crew of eighty men, when he died in 1815.