Fulton made his first boat in France, but he had bad luck there. Then he came to America and built a boat in New York. While he was at work on this boat in America, James Watt, of whom I have already told you, was building him an engine in England. He wanted the best engine that he could get, and he thought the Scotch inventor was the right man to make it. While Fulton was working some of the smart New Yorkers were laughing. They called his boat "Fulton's Folly," and said it would not move faster than the tide would carry it. But he let them laugh and worked on, and at last, one day in 1807, the new boat, which he named the "Clermont," was afloat in the Hudson ready for trial. Hundreds of curious people came to see it start. Some were ready to laugh again when they saw the boat, with its clumsy paddle-wheels hanging down in the water on both sides. They were not covered with wooden frames as were such wheels afterwards. "That boat move? So will a log move if set adrift," said the people who thought themselves very wise. "It will move when the tide moves it, and not before." But none of them felt like laughing when they saw the wheels begin to turn and the boat to glide out into the stream, moving against the tide. "She moves! she moves!" cried the crowd, and nobody said a word about "Fulton's Folly." Move she did. Up the Hudson she went against wind and current, and reached Albany, one hundred and forty-two miles away, in thirty-two hours. This was at the rate of four and a half miles an hour. It was not many years before steamboats were running on all our rivers. That is all I shall say here about the steamboat, for there is another story of invention I wish to tell you before I close. This is about the cotton fibre, which you know is the great product of the Southern States. The cotton plant when ripe has a white, fluffy head, and a great bunch of snow-white fibres, within which are the seeds. In old times these had to be taken out by hand, and it was a whole day's work for a negro to get the seeds out of a pound of the cotton. This made cotton so dear that not much of it could be sold. In 1784 eight bags of it were sent to Liverpool, and the custom-house people there seized it for duties. They said it must have been smuggled from some other country, for the United States could not have produced such a "prodigious quantity."