The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream [Paperback]

None of the spectators who gathered on the Hudson River shore on August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat. But as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this remarkable biography, Fulton's large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious machine would -- for better or worse -- irrevocably transform nineteenth-century America.
Set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic period in history,The Fire of His Geniustells the story of the fiercely driven man whose invention opened up America's interior to waves of settlers, created and sustained industrial and plantation economies in the nation's heartland, and facilitated the destruction of the remaining Indian civilizations. Probing Fulton's genius but also laying bare the darker side of the man -- and the darker side of the American dream -- Kirkpatrick Sale tells an extraordinary tale with deftness, zest, and unflagging verve.Kirkpatrick Saleis the secretary of the E. F. Schumacher Society, a contributing editor ofThe Nation,and the author of nine previous books, includingConquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian ConquestandRebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution.Chapter 1: TheNorth River

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. It was not their custom to parade out in midday on a Monday, certainly not two miles uptown from the stylish promenades of Broadway, but they were here on the Hudson shore just by the little village of Greenwich, almost within the shadow of the imposing stone walls of the new state prison, because so much excitement had been stirred up in the city lately by the prospect of Mr. Fulton's strange and improbablS)