LIFE ALONG THE HUDSON Remembered in Our Streets, Ferries & Landings Robert Fulton: A Biography, by Cynthia Owen Philip (Franklin Watts, New York, 1985 , 371 pp , illus, $18.95). New Yorkers, especially, will welcome the arrival of the biography of Robert Fulton, who has lent his name to streets , ferries, and landings in a city where he is otherwise surprisingly unknown. Cynthia Owen Philip successfully illuminates the mind and achievements of thi s quintessentially American inventor whose intellectual struggles took place in England and France, but whose finished product ended up benefitting his own state and country. Fulton is justly remembered as an inventor. Yet he was one of his own definition primarily , assimilating and developing the work of others as much as creating raw ideas of his own. He was also a citizen philosopher. In unfortunate juxtaposition to these qualities , he was a fierce entrepreneur, with a patent disregard for the achievements of others when they rivalled his own. An avowed patriot with a contempt for war because it disrupts man's normal capacity for productivity , he developed a submarine which he tried to sell to the French, the British and, in turn, to the United States. This invention, he believed, would bring peace to the seas, and ultimately to the whole world. The development and production of the first operable steamboats are the accomplishments for which he is best remembered . Although from the first the steamboat was an unqualified success, at once profitable and safe, Fulton's attempts to defend his dubious patents and the monopoly over interstate routes that he shared with Robert Livingston were a constant source of anxiety and embarassment, and his struggle with them contributed to his early death at the age of forty-nine. Fulton was fortunat\! to live in the age he did , an intellectually vital one which was to a considerable extreme without class boundaries for men of letters or science . Pennsylvania-born , Fulton apprenticed to a silversmith in Philadelphia and took up painting , the pursuit of which drew him to England. There he arrived with a letter of introduction to Benjamin West-some say from Benjamin Franklin . Although an able painter and draughtsman, which stood him in good stead throughout his career, he found the life unsatisfying , and took up an interest in the engineering of canals. The fruit of this initial work was his ''Treatise on the Improvement of Inland SEA HISTORY , AUTUMN 1985
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" ... highly interesting and readable account of life along the Hudson. " -Publishers Weekly ... like an old family album ... " -Newsday 98 photos & illus. , 272 pages , paperback
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A Striking Collection of Historic Photographs Showing Ships in Transit Through the World's Largest Lock Canal Over one hundred of the fin est ship photographs taken by Ernest .. Red .. Hallen, the Panama Canal"s offi cial photographer from 1907 to 1937, have been collected for presentation in this handsome book. Th e book is divided into three sections that picture naval. passenger, and cargo ships of all types and nationalities. Each photograph is accompan ied by an informative caption that provides a description of the ship. A brief history of th e canal introduces the book, and appendices offer list-; of first tran sits. first vesse ls by nation ality. an d canal traffic through 1939. 1985 / 192 pages / 100 photographs I Appendix / $29.95
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