Creative Combustion: Image, Imagination and the Work of Robert Fulton Elizabeth Bacon Eager Between 1797 and 1806, artist and engineer Robert Fulton (1765–1815), better known for his career as a steamboat entrepreneur, was almost wholly preoccupied with the planning and promotion of a system for submarine and torpedo warfare. Category: Uncategorized Tags: 2.1, Benjamin West, eighteenth-century art, Elizabeth Bacon Eager, Mason Chamberlin, nineteenth-century art, Robert Fulton