April 15 is the day Robert Edison Fulton, Jr. was born in New York City, in 1909. He was pretty well known, at least in the US, during his lifetime, but I bet you never heard of him.
He was a rich kid — his father was the president of an early truck manufacturer, Mack, and his uncle ran stagecoach lines in the western US, and gradually converted those into the Greyhound Bus Company. Both of those businesses are still around, but Fulton didn’t actually have much to do with them. Instead, as a rich kid, he traveled. He was a very early passenger on commercial airlines, flying from Miami to Havana in 1921, when he was only around 12. A couple years later King Tut’s tomb was opened in Egypt, and Fulton was there, even though he was still a boy.
He had an elite education, too. He attended middle school in Switzerland, then attended the prestigious US prep schools Exeter and Choate, and finally graduated from Harvard. His degree was in architecture, but he never practiced in that field. Instead, when he was 23, he bought a motorcycle and rode it 25,000 miles from London to Tokyo, over 18 months. He said it was to study world architecture, but when he returned he wrote a book, One Man Caravan, that detailed his many adventures. But it didn’t really mention anything about world architecture.
In addition to making notes for his book during his trip, he brought a movie camera and shot loads of footage. He edited the footage into some sort of order and went on a lecture tour of the US, selling his book, talking about his adventures (including spending a night in jail in Turkey) and showing his movies.
His experience making movies brought him an assignment from Pan American Airways, making documentaries of the flights of their flying boats, the Pan Am Clippers, across the Pacific. That was before World War II, of course. After that he founded a company, Continental, to manufacture equipment for airplanes. At that point he also embarked on his career as an inventor. He invented the first non-flying pilot training system, and adapted it to train aerial gunners for WWII. And he began his series of rather questionable names for his inventions. The pilot trainer he called the “Aerostructor,” and the gunnery system he called the “Gunairstructor.” He followed that up with an airplane that converted into a car, and called it the “Airphibian.” In contrast to all the other flying cars ostensibly invented around that era, the Airphibian actually worked, and was certified airworthy by the Civil Aeronautics Administration (nowadays it’s the FAA). You can still see it in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.
After WWII, Fulton invented the Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System — a way for an airplane to pick up people from the ground without landing. It worked, but might not have been very pleasant — it was basically a big hook. Even so, the US Air Force used it until 1996.
In 1983, Fulton and his sons released a 90-minute documentary film about his motorcycle trek: The One Man Caravan of Robert E. Fulton Jr., An Autobiography. You can see some excerpts from it on YouTube, as well as at least one documentary about the Airphibian. Fulton lived to be nearly 100. He invented a lot of other stuff — he had over 70 patents — but it’s not clear whether all his inventions had odd names.
