As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being a practical man of business, he organised a successful steamboat company together with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was American Minister to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying to sell his invention. The first steamer of this new company, the “Clermont,” which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York State, equipped with an engine built by Boulton and Watt of Birmingham in England, began a regular service between New York and Albany in the year 1807. [Illustration: THE FIRST STEAMBOAT] As for poor John Fitch, the man who long before any one else had used the “steam-boat” for commercial purposes, he came to a sad death. Broken in health and empty of purse, he had come to the end of his resources when his fifth boat, which was propelled by means of a screw-propeller, had been destroyed. His neighbours jeered at him as they were to laugh a hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his funny flying machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country an easy access to the broad rivers of the west and his countrymen preferred to travel in flat-boats or go on foot. In the year 1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed himself by taking poison. But twenty years later, the “Savannah,” a steamer of 1850 tons and making six knots an hour, (the Mauretania goes just four times as fast,) crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liverpool in the record time of twenty-five days. Then there was an end to the derision of the multitude and in their enthusiasm the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man. [Illustration: THE ORIGIN OF THE STEAMBOAT] Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had been building locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from the mine-pit to smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his famous “travelling engine” which reduced the price of coal by almost seventy per cent and which made it possible to establish the first regular passenger service between Manchester and Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler and Levassor of the eighties of the last century) can do better than these early “Puffing Billies.” [Illustration: THE ORIGIN OF THE AUTOMOBILE] But while these practically-minded engineers were improving upon their rattling “heat engines,” a group of “pure” scientists (men who devote fourteen hours of each day to the study of those “theoretical” scientific phenomena without which no mechanical progress would be possible) were following a new scent which promised to lead them into the most secret and hidden domains of Nature.