[Illustration:  FULTON’S DIVING-BOAT. (Going under water to fasten a torpedo on the bottom of a vessel.)]

Napoleon Bonaparte liked nothing so much as war, and he let Fulton have an old vessel to see if he could blow it up.  He tried it, and everything happened as he expected:  nothing was left of the vessel but the pieces.

[Footnote 3:  Swordfish:  the name given to a large fish which has a sword-like weapon, several feet in length, projecting from its upper jaw.]

[Footnote 4:  Torpedo:  here a can filled with powder, and so constructed that it could be fastened to the bottom of a vessel.]

195.  What Fulton did in England with his diving-boat; what he said about America.—­Then Fulton went back to England and tried the same thing there.  He went out in his diving-boat and fastened a torpedo under a vessel, and when the torpedo exploded, the vessel, as he said, went up like a “bag of feathers,” flying in all directions.

[Illustration:  WHAT THE TORPEDO DID.]

The English people paid Fulton seventy-five thousand dollars for showing them what he could do in this way.  Then they offered to give him a great deal more—­in fact, to make him a very rich man—­if he would promise never to let any other country know just how he blew vessels up.  But Fulton said, ’I am an American; and if America should ever want to use my diving-boat in war, she shall have it first of all.’

196.  Fulton makes his first steamboat.—­But while Fulton was doing these things with his diving-boat, he was always thinking of the paddle-wheel scow he used to fish in when a boy.  I turned those paddle-wheels by a crank, said he, but what is to hinder my putting a steam engine into such a boat, and making it turn the crank for me? that would be a steamboat.  Such boats had already been tried, but, for one reason or another, they had not got on very well.  Robert R. Livingston was still in France, and he helped Fulton build his first steamboat.  It was put on a river there; it moved, and that was about all.

197.  Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston go to New York and build a steamboat; the trip up the Hudson River.—­But Robert Fulton and Mr. Livingston both believed that a steamboat could be built that would go, and that would keep going.  So they went to New York and built one there.

In the summer of 1807 a great crowd gathered to see the boat start on her voyage up the Hudson River.  They joked and laughed as crowds will at anything new.  They called Fulton a fool and Livingston another.  But when Fulton, standing on the deck of his steamboat, waved his hand, and the wheels began to turn, and the vessel began to move up the river, then the crowd became silent with astonishment.  Now it was Fulton’s turn to laugh, and in such a case the man who laughs last has a right to laugh the loudest.

[Illustration:  FULTON’S STEAMER LEAVING NEW YORK FOR ALBANY.]

Up the river Fulton kept going.  He passed the Palisades;[5] he passed the Highlands;[6] still he kept on, and at last he reached Albany, a hundred and fifty miles above New York.