Now came a surprising, puzzling twist in the story. At some point that autumn, after insisting so aggressively on the superiority of his endless chain, Fulton decided to adopt paddle wheels as his propelling device. His biographers have guessed that Fulton switched to avoid infringing a French patent, granted earlier that year to an inventor named Desblancs, for a similar steamboat with an endless chain. But Fulton had learned of this patent in June, and as late as September he was nonetheless still urging his own version of an endless chain. Something else must have persuaded him to change this crucial aspect of his design.
A possible explanation was later provided by William Symington. As he told the story in the 1820s, Fulton had come to Scotland to see one of Symington’s vessels, explaining that he intended to return to America to build a steamboat, and that his project could lead to a rewarding business for Symington as the inventor. Flattered and intrigued, Symington ordered steam up in his paddle wheeler and took Fulton and others for a ride. From Lock 18 on the Forth and Clyde Canal, they went four miles west and back in one hour and twenty minutes, at an average speed of six miles an hour – ‘to the great astonishment of Mr. Fulton and the other gentlemen present’, according to Symington. Fulton asked questions, took notes, and made sketches of the steamboat. After this single encounter, Symington recalled, he never saw or heard from Fulton again.
The dating of Fulton’s visit presents problems. Symington placed it in July 1801 or July 1802. In 1801, however, France and England were at war, severely limiting travel between the two countries. Fulton would have had great difficulty in making his way from France to Scotland; at the time he was also still quite focused on his submarine and mines, to the exclusion of other interests. The Peace of Amiens in March 1802 allowed a brief lull in hostilities, easing travel restrictions. By then Fulton, with Livingston’s beckoning patronage, had turned his attention nearly full-time to inventing a steamboat. He spent the summer of 1802 at a resort in the Vosges Mountains of northeast France, too far from the English Channel for a convenient trip to Scotland. That autumn he was back in Paris, intent on his steamboat. The most probable date of Fulton’s encounter with Symington is thus the autumn of 1802, when the Charlotte Dundas was almost ready for her first major trial of January 1803. The journey from Paris took three days to London, then about sixty hours by mail coach to Glasgow. He could have made the round-trip in two weeks.
With travel again flowing between France and England, Paris was full of British tourists from whom Fulton or the widely acquainted Livingston might have heard about Symington’s boat. A trip to England was clearly on Fulton’s mind that autumn. His friend Joel Barlow, also interested in promoting a joint steamboat scheme, had recently urged Fulton to go to England ‘silent and steady… quiet and quick’ to obtain a steam engine. His formal agreement with Livingston in October also bound Fulton to go ‘immediately’ to England for the same purpose. Fulton left no surviving record of such a trip at that time. But he could have gone secretly – silent and steady, quiet and quick – on steamboat business, especially to examine the Charlotte Dundas, the most promising such experiment in the world at that time. In late September, he was conspicuously absent from a dinner party given in Paris by the painter Benjamin West. Fulton was a close friend to West, his main mentor in painting. Joel Barlow and his wife, with whom Fulton lived in a ménage à trois, did attend the dinner. If Fulton had been in Paris, he surely would have joined the party. Perhaps he was then quietly off to Scotland.
This mystery turns on hard questions about Fulton’s character. Could he have made a clandestine trip to Scotland, borrowed from Symington’s work, and later hidden the entire episode? His subsequent history of lies and deceit suggests that he might have. In 1806, for example, he claimed in writing that he had held an American steamboat patent for fourteen years, and that some $280,000 had been subscribed to build twenty of his vessels for service on the Mississippi River – none of which was even remotely true. Later, when embroiled in patent controversies, he forged a ‘copy’ of a drawing he had supposedly made in June 1802 of a Hudson River steamboat with paddle wheels, at a time when he was actually still committed to an endless chain for propulsion. He also forged a letter, which he dated to 1793, about his supposed interest in paddle wheels at that time. In 1815, shortly before his death, he was caught committing perjury with this letter. All these manipulations were intentional, self-serving lies on Fulton’s part.
Symington’s later recollections, by contrast, erred in some details, but the essence of his account of the Charlotte Dundas is verifiably true. His version of the Fulton story was also corroborated by Symington’s engine man, Robert Weir. In 1824, after the matter had become controversial, Weir signed a sworn affidavit that he had fired up the boiler of the Charlotte Dundas on the occasion of Fulton’s visit and had heard Fulton identify himself by name and nationality. After their brisk eight-mile demonstration, according to Weir, Symington had lamented the difficulty of running his steamboat through the narrow Forth and Clyde Canal, and Fulton had replied that the broad rivers of America would present no such problem. The details and certainty of Weir’s affidavit seem authentic.
Fulton’s own explanation of how he converted to paddle wheels, later given under duress, must be weighed carefully. In 1811 he asked Joel Barlow to endorse his version of certain events for a potential patent lawsuit. ‘I want your deposition as follows,’ he instructed: that in the autumn of 1802, while living at Barlow’s home in Paris, he had conducted experiments with various propelling devices, which by Christmastime had convinced him to adopt paddle wheels. ‘You will have this copied on foolscap,’ Fulton told Barlow, ‘and sware to it.’ Barlow apparently complied. It was at about this time that Fulton also forged other documents to bolster his claims of steamboat originality.
The smoking gun in this mystery is the vessels that Symington and Fulton actually produced. In January 1803 Fulton drew up the plans for his first steamboat. Overtly she did not much resemble the Charlotte Dundas. long and lean instead of short and stubby, with a different arrangement of the machinery and a distinct means of converting the engine’s reciprocating action to rotary motion. But in four crucial respects the boats may be linked. In both cases the engine’s cylinder was put in the exact centre of the hull, with the boiler behind it. Like the Charlotte Dundas, and unlike the vessel recently proposed in his agreement with Livingston, Fulton’s first steamboat was a towboat, with room on board just for the machinery, fuel and crew. Both vessels were propelled by paddle wheels: Symington’s by a single wheel at the stern, Fulton’s by two wheels attached to the sides. And – the most telling detail – Fulton’s paddle wheels were placed quite high in the boat, as in the Charlotte Dundas, so that only three paddles were under water at once, avoiding the wasted up-and-down motions of a more deeply immersed wheel.
It seems more than probable that Fulton did see the Charlotte Dundas and borrow from her design without ever acknowledging the debt. His first steamboat, built to the plans of January 1803, underwent a successful trial on the Seine later that year. Fulton eventually returned to the United States and, with Livingston’s support and a Boulton and Watt engine imported from England, made the paddle wheel steamboat later known to history as the Clermont. Her machinery and paddles closely resembled those of Fulton’s first steamboat of 1803 – and therefore may also be linked to the Charlotte Dundas. With the Clermont and her successors, Fulton ran a profitable steamboat service between Albany and New York City, marking the first sustained commercial use of steam navigation. The unfortunate Symington faded into obscurity and died penniless in 1831.
From this point on, geography largely determined the separate development of steamboats in America and Great Britain. In the United States, with its vast internal networks of inland lakes and long, broad, navigable rivers, steam navigation typically took the form of riverboats: large, fragile