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The Liberty of the Seas will be the Happiness of the Earth.
-Robert Fulton, Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions, 1810
Robert Fulton is usually remembered as the American "inventor" of the steamboat. Historians of technology are also aware that Fulton was the inventor/ designer of other technical systems, such as a canal system that used inclined planes instead of locks to raise and lower canal boats, and an early submarine that he originally called a "plunging boat" (later called the "Nautilus"). Fulton also developed underwater mines that he called "torpedoes," and over a period of years he developed a naval weapons system that he hoped would keep the seas safe for travel and commerce. A dedicated innovator, Fulton hoped to make his fortune by offering his torpedo system to the highest bidder, and he tried in earnest to sell it to at least three national governments-the French, the British, and the United States. He considered his torpedo system, the subject of this note, more important than the steamboat, but history proved otherwise.
Two of Fulton's original colored drawings of his proposed torpedoes, dated 1804, are now held by the Lehigh University Libraries Special Collections Department. Lehigh acquired the drawings in January 1959 as a gift from Robert B. Honeyman Jr., a metallurgical engineering graduate of the class of 1920, and his wifeMarion [Stewart]. Early in his career,Honeyman had begun to collect rare books, including material in literature, art, and the history of science and technology, from which he made a series of gifts to Lehigh over the course of many years.1 Among them were the two holographic Fulton drawings. Readers of Technology and Culture will be especially interested in librarian James D. Mack's acknowledgment of receipt.He wrote in part that "we should look up the sources to see whether these [drawings] have been published. If not, they might be acceptable in a new journal covering the history of technology."2 The "new journal" to which Mack referred was almost assuredly Technology and Culture, for which as librarian he would have received a circular and whose premier issue would appear later that year. For whatever reason, Mack apparently never followed through on the Technology and Culture submission, but now, a half century later, we are pleased to...