Before his steamboat made him famous, the painter-turned-engineer Robert Fulton spent years designing a submarine and trying to sell it to France and then to Britain. Drawing on Fulton’s own drawings and descriptions, rediscovered in the 1890s, the engineer Parsons reconstructs the boat, its trials and the long negotiations with suspicious ministers.
An absorbing chapter in naval and engineering history, written by the chief engineer of New York’s first subway. Download the free EPUB.