The book presents Robert Fulton, the purported inventor of the steamboat, in a new and more significant light: as a hustler. Except for Benjamin Franklin, Fulton was the most famous and iconic inventor of the early American republic, a position he held into the twentieth century. But he did not invent the steamboat, nor did any of his other claimed inventions ever gain much traction in his day. Rather he copied or elaborated the ideas of others, seldom achieving adoption or success with any of his knockoffs. Indeed, his greatest invention was himself, posing as an “engineer” and a “gentleman.” But hustlers have played an important and largely unrecognized role in American history. Even America’s most famous inventor, Thomas Edison, admitted to having something of the hustler in him. These were people who, in the modern argot, chose to “fake it till you make it.” Fulton finally made it, and along the way his rags-to-riches story reveals much about the economies and patent systems of England, France, and the United States, where he spent his whole life. And the key roles of capital and political influence in his final success reveals much about innovation in the industrialized world that first appeared in his lifetime.

Alex Roland is Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University, where he taught military history and the history of technology. A 1966 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Professor Roland served in the Marine Corps (Vietnam, 1967–1968) before taking his PhD in History at Duke in 1974. From 1973 to 1981 he was a historian with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. After joining the Duke faculty in 1981, he chaired the Department of History (1995–2000) and held the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College and the Dr. Leo Shifrin Chair of Naval-Military History at his alma mater. His books include Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail (1978); Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915–1958 (1985); The Military-Industrial Complex (2001); with Richard Preston and Sidney Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (5^th ed., 1991); with Philip Shiman, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983–1993 (2002); with W. Jeffrey Bolster and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600–2000 (2008); War and Technology: A Very Short Introduction (2016); and Delta of Power: The Military Industrial Complex (2012). He has edited A Spacefaring People (1985) and, with Peter Galison, Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century (2000). He is past president of the Society for the History of Technology and recipient of the Society’s daVinci Medal, and vice president of the Society for Military History.