Inventors . ed the BritishMinister to communicate with Fulton and try tosecure to England his services. In this he wassuccessful, and Fulton went to London, where hearrived in 1804, and met Pitt and Lord Mr. Pitt first saw a drawing of a torpedowith a sketch of the mode of applying it, andunderstood what would be the effect of the ex-plosion, he said that if it were introduced intopractice it could not fail to annihilate all navies. But from the subsequent conduct of the Brit-ish ministry it is supposed that they never reallyintended to give Fulton a fair opportunity to try ROBER
Inventors . ed the BritishMinister to communicate with Fulton and try tosecure to England his services. In this he wassuccessful, and Fulton went to London, where hearrived in 1804, and met Pitt and Lord Mr. Pitt first saw a drawing of a torpedowith a sketch of the mode of applying it, andunderstood what would be the effect of the ex-plosion, he said that if it were introduced intopractice it could not fail to annihilate all navies. But from the subsequent conduct of the Brit-ish ministry it is supposed that they never reallyintended to give Fulton a fair opportunity to try ROBERT FULTON 53 the effect of his submarine engines. Their ob-ject may have been to prevent these devicesgetting into the hands of an enemy. Severalexperiments Avere made, and some of them werefailures, but on October 15, 1805, he blew up astrong-built Danish brig of two hundred tonsburden, which had been provided for the experi-ment and which was anchored near the residence >-- >>v/- • :>> I ,,. & i/lktl //:lll- Ml**- s Fulton Blowing Up a Danish Brig. of Pitt. The torpedo used on this occasion con-tained one hundred and seventy pounds of pow-der. In fifteen minutes from the time of startingthe machinery the explosion took place. It liftedthe brig almost entire and broke her completelyin two ; in one minute nothing was to be seen ofher but floating fragments. Notwithstandingthe complete success of this experiment, theBritish ministry seems to have had nothing to dowith Fulton. The inventor was rather discour- INVENTORS aged at this lack of appreciation and, after somefurther experiments, he sailed for New York inDecember, 1806. In this country Fulton devoted himself at onceto his projects of submarine warfare and steamnavigation. So far from being discouraged byhis failure to impress Europe with the impor-tance of his torpedoes, his confidence was un-shaken, because he saw that his failures were tobe attributed to trivial errors that could easilybe corrected. He i
Size: 2305px × 1084px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookpublishernewyorkcscribnerss
