The Fire of His Genius (2001) By Kirkpatrick Sale

This’ truly the season (presidential election season) to scrap the standard way of telling history. Let's forget Washington, Jefferson, King David, Napoleon, Justinian, Caesar, Laozi, Voltaire, and the Greats: Alexander, Catherine and Peter.  People are tiresome, and they die.  Maybe we should give primacy in history to inventions:  the wheel, the abacus, the computer, flight, vaccines, and the steamboat.  Okay, maybe we keep the multi-dimensional Ben Franklin and his kite.

This re-ordering of history telling seems to be the plot of Kirkpatrick Sales’ biography of Robert Fulton The Fire of His Genius.  And, he has a point.  Fulton, the namesake of numerous locales in the United States (including Fulton, Kentucky, a.k.a. “the banana capital of the world,” the cause of my review of Peter Chapman’s Bananas), is all but forgotten to modern times.  Yet, he perfected the all but forgotten but exceedingly historically significant steamboat, and proved it could be a commercial success.

Let’s see, without the steamboat:  no Manifest Destiny, no Hudson River Line, no upstream Mississippi River traffic, no Show Boat nor Old Man River; and alas, no backdrop for Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer.  And to jump industries, without his financial success running a steamboat line, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt would have never had the capital necessary to give us the New York Central Rail Road, or the Biltmore for that matter.

As is often the case with a genius, focus was always a problem for Fulton.  His work on steamboats more times than not was delayed, much to the irritation of his business partner, by Fulton’s dalliance with naval warfare.  He was fascinated with and did much of the earlier engineering work on submarines, torpedoes and water mines – all three of which would make their mark, for better or worse, on world history (and this interest was strictly as an engineer, not as a patriot, he serially and sometimes simultaneously tried to sell these ideas to the French, British, and American governments while they warred with each other).

Oh, and then there is Fulton’s personal life (1765 – 1815), which would raise a few eyebrows even today.

Sales’ book is interesting, his research is exhaustive – his writing is dull.  Yet, The Fire of His Genius is still a worthy read, helping to connect the historical dots of many of those dead people.