Fulton's Steamboat Conquers the Hudson

On August 17, 1807, the engineer Robert Fulton sent his new steamboat churning out of New York City and up the Hudson River, bound for Albany roughly 150 miles away. Crowds had jeered the contraption as “Fulton’s Folly,” doubting that a boiler and paddle wheels could ever beat wind and current.

The vessel, officially the North River Steamboat but later misremembered as the Clermont, held a steady pace of about 5 miles per hour against the river’s flow. It reached Albany in roughly 32 hours of running time, a passage that could take sailing sloops the better part of a week when the breeze failed.

Steam, not sail, would now set the schedule.

Fulton did not invent the steam engine or even the steamboat, but he was the first to make steam navigation a commercially successful business. Within weeks his boat began scheduled passenger service, and within decades steamboats reshaped travel and trade across America’s rivers and coasts.