An individual of extraordinary qualities had now turned his attention to the problem of steam propulsion. In that same year a young American artist, Robert Fulton, who had come to England to work under the guidance of his countryman Benjamin West, wrote to Lord Stanhope informing him of a plan which he had formed for moving ships by steam. Lord Stanhope, well known as a scientific inventor, had recently been experimenting with a vessel fitted with a 12-horse-power engine of Boulton and Watt’s working a propeller which operated like the foot of an aquatic bird. A correspondence ensued. Fulton, whose self-confidence equalled his originality, illustrated by drawings and diagrams his ideas on the subject. At first, he said, he thought of applying the force of an engine to an oar or paddle which, hinged on the counter at the stern, by a reciprocating motion would urge the vessel ahead. But on experimenting with a clockwork model he found that, though the boat sprang forward, the return stroke of the paddle interfered with the continuity of the motion. “I then endeavoured,” he wrote, “to give it a circular motion, which I effected by applying two paddles on an axis. Then the boat moved by jerks; there was too great a space between the strokes. I then applied three paddles, forming an equilateral triangle to which I gave a circular motion.” These paddles he proposed to place in cast-iron wheels one on each side of the boat and mounted on the same shaft at some height over the waterline, so that each wheel would “answer as a fly and brace to the perpendicular oars.” And he stated that he found, from his experiments with models, that three or six oars gave better results than any other number. From which it is clear that the paddlewheel was evolved by Fulton from the simple paddle independently of suggestion received from previous inventors.