![]() He made pencils for his own use out of lead, and he made rockets for his own Fourth of July celebration. He was not fond of books, but he was ingenious. Robert Fulton was born in Pennsylvania in 1765. This made the people laugh, for they thought him what we call "a crank." ![]() Fitch grew extremely poor and ragged, but he used to say that, when "Johnny Fitch" should be forgotten, steamboats would run up the rivers and across the sea. The engine was feeble, and the boat ran but slowly. His boat was tried on the Delaware River in 1787. He made his engine run a number of oars, so as to paddle the boat forward. He did not imitate the cluck's foot or the steam-pump, but, like most other inventors, he borrowed from what had been used. He had been a soldier in the Revolution and a captive among the American Indians. He was an ingenious, poor fellow, who had knocked about in the world making buttons out of old brass kettles and mending guns. An American named Rumsey moved his boat by forcing a stream of water through it, drawing it in at the bow and pushing it out at the stern. ![]() When once steam was put to work, men said, "Why not make it run a boat?" One English inventor tried to run his boat by making the engine push through the water a thing somewhat like a duck's foot. He went to work to improve it, and he became the real inventor of the first steam-engine that was good for all sorts of work that the world wants done. He was once called to repair one of these wheezy, old-fashioned pumping-engines. Watt became a maker of mathematical instruments. This had been invented sixty years before. There was nothing but a clumsy steam-engine that could work slowly an up-and-down pump to take water out of mines. In his day, there were no steamboats, or steam-mills, or railways. More than a hundred years ago, a sickly Scotch boy named James Watt used to sit and watch the lid of his mother's tea-kettle as it rose and fell while the water was boiling, and wonder about the power of steam, which caused this rattling motion.
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