Fulton invented a machine for cutting marble, one for spinning flax, a double inclined plane for canal navigation, a machine for twisting rope, an earth-scoop for canal and irrigation purposes, a cable-cutter, the earliest French panorama, a submarine torpedo boat, and the steamboat. Other men had worked over steamboats, but he reached the goal. He made the steamboat practicable, as Watt had the steam-engine. Above all, he was very fortunate; he found his countrymen ready to welcome the _Clermont_, and to fall in with his plans, an attitude which had not faced certain men in England and in France who had built similar boats earlier than Fulton. Some engineers have been tempted to call him a lucky amateur, a talented artist who happened to become interested in new methods of navigation. If one grants all this there is still the fact that it was the _Clermont’s_ success that opened the watercourses of the world to steam. “Quicksilver Bob” he was called as a boy in Lancaster, because he used to buy all that metal he could for experiments. Even then he was many-sided. He made designs for firearms and experimented with guns to learn the carrying distance of various bores and balls. There was a factory in Lancaster where arms were being made for the Continental troops, and “Quicksilver Bob” was given the run of the place. In addition he painted signs to hang before the village shops and taverns. To simplify his fishing expeditions he made a model of a boat propelled by paddles, and later he built such a boat and used it on the Conestoga River. No one could tell what he would turn to next. When Hessian prisoners were kept in the neighborhood the town boys would go out to look at them, and Robert would make sketches of them. These sketches gave him a local reputation, and his friends were not surprised when at seventeen he left Lancaster to seek his fortune as a painter of portraits and miniatures in Philadelphia. He was well liked in the city. He had a talent for friendship, which, combined with good looks, more than ordinary intelligence, and most uncommon industry, carried him far. He drew plans for machinery, he designed houses and carriages, he worked as professional painter. Franklin became his patron and adviser. Then illness sent him to the fashionable hot springs of Virginia, and there he heard so much talk of England and of France that he decided to see those countries for himself. Before he left America he bought a farm in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in order to insure a home for his mother and sisters. That done, he sailed for England, with a packet of letters of introduction, in 1786.