Robert Fulton the "Nautilus", the first practical submarine in history. Fulton is also credited with inventing some of the world's earliest naval torpedoes for use by the British Royal Navy. Fulton became interested in steam engines and the idea of steamboats in 1777 when he was around age 12 and visited state delegate William Henry of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who was interested in this topic. Henry had learned about inventor James Watt and his Watt steam engine on an earlier visit to England. Robert Fulton was born on a farm in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, on November 14, 1765. He had three sisters –
Steam engine engines in power generation, due to lower cost, higher operating speed, and higher efficiency. The first recorded rudimentary steam-powered "engine" was the aeolipile described by Hero of Alexandria, a mathematician and engineer in Roman Egypt in the first century AD. In the following centuries, the few steam-powered "engines" known were, like the aeolipile, essentially experimental devices used by inventors to demonstrate the properties of steam. A rudimentary steam turbine device was described by Taqi al-Din in Ottoman Egypt in 1551 and by Giovanni Branca in Italy in 1629. Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont received patents in 1606 for 50 steam