But Fulton was a persistent man or he would never have got his name into the history books. He stayed in Paris, where his friend Joel Barlow was American minister, and supported himself by inventing and exhibiting what he called “the pictures”: the first moving pictures the world had ever seen. These were panoramas, where the picture was not thrown on the screen by a lantern but painted on it, and the long roll of painted canvas was unrolled like a film between two large spools on opposite sides of the stage. Very few people remember that Robert Fulton invented the panorama, though only a generation ago the great panorama of the battle of Gettysburg drew and thrilled as large audiences as a film like “The Birth of a Nation” does to-day. Fulton painted his own panoramas himself, for he was an artist before he was an engineer. He made three of them and had to build a separate little theater to show each one in. The Parisians were so well pleased with this novelty that they made up a song about the panoramas, and the street where the most popular of the three was shown is still called “La Rue Fulton.” The picture that won the inventor this honor was a panorama of the burning of Moscow--not the burning of the city to drive out Napoleon, for that came a dozen years later, but an earlier conflagration, some time in the eighteenth century. Napoleon overthrew the Directory and became First Consul and absolute ruler of France in 1800. He appointed three expert naval engineers to examine Fulton’s plans, and on their approval, Napoleon advanced him 10,000 francs to build a submarine.