In London Fulton professed himself to be an artist, although his thoughts were constantly tending toward inventions. He lived at the house of Benjamin West, and painted, and his portraits were shown at the Royal Academy and at the Society of Artists. Betimes he enjoyed himself in society and in trips to the counties. He journeyed into Devonshire and stayed at Powderham Castle, copying famous pictures there. Wherever he went he made friends, and their influence was constantly helping him forward on what must have been a somewhat precarious career. Two of these friends, the Duke of Bridgewater and the Earl of Stanhope, were scientists of repute. The Duke owned a great estate, of untold mineral wealth, which had never been properly worked because of lack of transportation facilities. He had recently built several canals on this property, and was at the head of a number of companies which were planning to intersect England with waterways. He interested Fulton in his schemes and gradually weaned his thoughts away from art to civil engineering. The Earl of Stanhope corresponded with him over the possibility of propelling boats by steam, and in these letters Fulton first gave the outlines of the plans he was later to perfect in the _Clermont_. The Earl was deeply interested, and encouraged the young American to persevere, but for the time Fulton left the steamboat to work out other problems. The possibility of a great English canal system appealed to him strongly, and in 1794 he obtained an English patent for a double inclined plane for raising and lowering canal boats. Later he took English patents on a machine for spinning flax, and on a new device for twisting hemp rope. There followed others for a machine that should scoop out earth to make canals or aqueducts, for a “Market or Passage Boat” to use on canals, and for a “Dispatch Boat” that should travel quickly. He sent drawings of all these inventions to his influential friends, hoping that they would push them, and he also wrote and published “A Treatise on Canal Navigation.” By this time he would seem to have given up all thought of the artist’s career, and to have turned his talent with the pen to the aid of his mechanical drawings.