Robert Fulton, who would develop the world’s first commercially successful steamboat, was born not far away from the Susquehanna River in Little Britain, Lancaster County.

Born on Nov. 14, 1765, to Irish immigrants and farmers Robert and Mary (Smith) Fulton, the boy showed an interest in art and mechanical contraptions at a young age. The 364-acre family farm reportedly was successful with crops of grain and wheat. In addition to Robert, the Fulton family also boasted three sisters, Isabella, Elizabeth, and Mary, as well as a younger brother, Abraham.

Fascinated by science, Fulton was interested in steam engines when he was 12. In 1777, he learned of and visited fellow steam engine devotee and state delegate William Henry. The Lancaster representative shared information he learned what he knew about Scottish steamboat innovator James Watt.

Fulton was working on a paddleboat and experiment with guns and rockets, earning himself the nickname “Quicksilver Bob.”

The elder Robert Fulton was a respected member of the community who also served on a three-member municipal auditor board for the community. In 1767 through 1771, his name frequently appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper, advertising civil court case-level business dealings gone wrong.

In 1783, Fulton moved to Philadelphia, met and started a friendship with Benjamin Franklin. In 1785, Fulton produced one of the most famous portraits of fellow innovator.

Franklin was impressed with Fulton; he wrote a letter of introduction to Benjamin West (who happened to be a good friend of his father) and other art influencers in Europe. In 1786, Fulton traveled overseas and connected with leaders in London’s art community. It has also been reported that Fulton “developed symptoms of tuberculosis and was advised by an eminent doctor to take an ocean voyage for the benefit of his health.” Fulton would spend the next 20 years in Europe.

Around this same time, his father passed away. Fulton helped support the family with his art, which included painting landscapes, miniatures and portraits. Through commissions and other works, he was able to save enough money to buy a farm in Hopewell Township, Washington County. His family would relocate to that small town. All the while, Fulton never forgot about civil engineering and mechanical inventions.

This included boats on canals. Steam-powered ships were experimental in 1776, and technology continued to improve into the 1780s, and the first successful steamboat in America sailed in 1787. Between the 1790s and 1810s, “Canal Mania” was rampant in England and Wales. In 1793, Fulton began working on foregoing locks in favor of canals with inclined planes. He also started to focus on the development of submarines.

In 1794, he officially began working on using steam to power boats. Fulton published a pamphlet with his ideas and a patented dredging machine and published articles about steamboat advancements in 1796.

By 1797, Fulton was beginning to be well-known as an inventor. He moved to France and continued to study math and science, while painting still helped pay the bills. In 1800, there was an exhibition of his paintings in Paris.

The American transplant had been trying to sell the idea of the submarine to the French Navy; it was Napoleon Bonaparte who officially commissioned a design. Although Dutch engineer Cornelis Drebbel developed a submarine for the Royal Navy in 1620, Fulton countered with Nautilus, the first “practical” submarine. He is also credited with inventing and developing the world’s first working torpedoes.

In 1801, Fulton met the recently appointed U.S. Ambassador to France, wealthy investor Robert L. Livingston. They shared common interests, including the idea of a functioning steamboat. The men collaborated for years on the River Seine and beyond. In 1803, Fulton floated a 66-foot-long boat before it ultimately sank.

In 1804, Fulton moved to Great Britain and worked with William Pitt the Younger. His father, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, was Pittsburgh’s namesake.

There, Fulton’s torpedoes were used with some success during the Raid on Boulogne. His inventions were also utilized during the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, before moving back to the United States in 1806.

Fulton and Livingston set their steamboat sites on what was then called the North River. Fulton said, “My first steamboat on the Hudson's River was 150 feet long, 13 feet wide, drawing 2 ft. of water, bow and stern 60 degrees: she displaced 36.40 [sic] cubic feet, equal 100 tons of water; her bow presented 26 ft. to the water, plus and minus the resistance of 1 ft. running 4 miles an hour.”

The North River steamer, nicknamed “Fulton’s Folly” by critics and filled with passengers, left New York City for its 300 nautical mile round-trip at 1 p.m. on Aug. 17, 1807. At an at the time brisk 5 miles an hour, it took 32 hours of travel (plus a 20-hour stop at Livingston’s Clermont Manor) to get to Albany. On the way back, the ship stopped only once, for one hour, at the estate, before arriving back in New York at 4 p.m. Best known today as the Clermont, the North River steamboat was an unqualified success.

Commercial passenger service on the steamboat started just a few weeks later, on Sept. 4, 1807.

Along the way, Fulton met Livingston’s niece, Harriett, herself an aspiring artist and musician. Fulton 42, and Harriett 24, quickly became a couple and were married at the Livingston family’s Teviotdale home on June 8, 1808. The couple had three children: Robert Barlow, Julia, Cornelia and Mary Livingston Fulton. For a while, Julia was a painter like her parents.

A workaholic, Fulton, who was called “a celebrated mechanical genius” in print, spent the next several years amassing an impressive steam-fueled fortune. Always developing torpedoes and other innovations, Fulton also designed the first steam-driven warship.

Fulton’s steamboat New Orleans was built in Pittsburgh and considered the first boat of its kind “on the Western waters of the United States.”

In 1811, it traveled from Pittsburgh on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers all the way to its namesake city on the Gulf of Mexico. Like Clermont, New Orleans ushered in a new era of water-based commercialism.

Then, tragedy. To save a friend, Thomas Addis Emmet, who had broken through the ice during a walk on the frozen Hudson River, Fulton dove into the freezing water and subsequently got gravely ill. He died on Feb. 23, 1815 (some sources identify the 24th) from tuberculosis. He was 49 and had built 17 steamboats with five more in various stages of completion.

Since Fulton’s death, five U.S. Navy ships have been christened in his honor. There are busts and statues with his likeness. His birthplace burned down, was rebuilt and now is a historical museum not far from the Robert Fulton Highway. In addition, Pennsylvania’s Fulton County is one of seven across the United States that bears his name.

In 1920, playwright Rida Johnson Young wrote a fictionalized play about Fulton’s adventures preparing for that maiden voyage on the Hudson River called “Little Old New York” that was performed 308 times.

A “historical drama” silent film version of the play starring Courtenay Foote as Fulton and Hollywood’s No. 1 female star of the day, Marion Davies, was released to great success in 1923. In 1940, the film was remade with British actor Richard Greene portraying Fulton and Alice Faye nearly stealing the film as Fulton’s zany friend Patricia O’Day. It grossed $2 million, which is about $47 million today. It was a financial success.

Fulton was inducted into the “National Inventors Hall of Fame” in Alexandria, Virginia in 2006.

Robert Fulton’s likeness has appeared in a BBC series in the 1960s, a “Casper, the Friendly Ghost” cartoon in 1955, and Fulton’s Crab House restaurant at Walt Disney World was shaped in the form of a steamboat until 2016.