The Fire of His Genius

Description

"None of the well-dressed crowd that gathered on the Hudson River side of Lower Manhattan on the hot afternoon of August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat, the North River, the boat that is frequently - and wrongly - remembered as the Clermont. But, as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this biography of Fulton, the North River's successful four-day round-trip to Albany proved a technology that would transform nineteenth-century America, open up the interior to huge waves of settlers, create and sustain industrial and plantation economies in the nation's heartland, and destroy the remaining Indian civilizations and most of the wild lands on which they depended. The North River's four-day trip introduced the machines and culture that marked the birth of the Industrial Revolution in America. The Fire of His Genius tells the story of the extraordinarily driven and ambitious inventor who brought all this about, probing into the undoubted genius of his mind but, too, laying bare the darker side of the man - and the darker side of the American dream that inspired him."--Jacket.

First Sentence

MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 1807, was another hot summer day in New York City, and most of the women of fashion on the pier, arms linked to laced and ruffled gentlemen, had their little pastel parasols up against the sun.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American DreamHardcoverFree Press2001-09-04
• The Fire of His GeniusPaperbackFree Press2002-08-27