The few remaining years in Robert Fulton’s life were very busy ones. In 1809 he formed a stock company to finance the building of steam ferries to run from New York to Jersey City, and so thoroughly was Fulton trusted that the entire construction of the new boats was left solely to him. Before this time there had been rowboat and sail-boat ferries, and a “horse-boat,” propelled by paddles which were turned by the feet of four blind horses walking a tread-mill. We can imagine how welcome were Fulton’s steam ferries. He called them “twin-boats” because he built each boat with two complete hulls, connected by a bridge or deck, which provided a wide platform for carriages and passengers. The ends were rounded, just as they are in present-day ferries, so that the boats could cross and re-cross the river without turning; and floating docks were built to receive them, also “fenders,” to avoid any shock from collision when the boats came to shore. It has been said that if steam navigation had been applied to no other purpose than to move these “floating bridges,” over streams where no other bridge could be built, he who applied it would deserve to rank among the great benefactors of mankind. Fulton called his first ferry-boats _York_ and _Jersey_, and the one he built in 1812 for the East River was named _Nassau_. As traffic increased between the New York terminals a new street was opened between the ferries, in 1816-18, and was appropriately named Fulton Street. The ferry over the East River, where thousands of persons daily crossed to Brooklyn and other points on Long Island, also honored the inventor, and was called “Fulton Ferry.” These busy years of Fulton’s life were harassed by lawsuits over patent rights; for as soon as steam navigation was proved a success, certain unscrupulous speculators rushed in to try to make money by the new invention. Fulton called them “mental pirates” because they tried to steal the riches of his mind, and in many cases they succeeded in making more money from the invention than Fulton himself ever gained. You may remember that during his stay in France Fulton had been impressed by the splendid possibilities of opening navigation on the great Mississippi River. This idea came to him when the United States purchased Louisiana. As soon as the _Clermont_ was established as a passenger boat on the Hudson River, the partners, Livingston and Fulton, decided to engage the services of a third person who was interested in steam navigation, namely, Nicholas J. Roosevelt, a personal friend of both men and an experimenter, as early as 1781, with an original, although since abandoned, plan for a steamboat.