A painter/ engineer who got financial backing to build a powerful steam engine (Clermont). Skeptics called it ''Fulton's Folly''. But in 1807 the boat made the 150 mile run from New York City up the Hudson River to Albany in 32 hours. Within a few years Fulton changed all of America's navigable streams into two-way arteries and forever changed the way the West and the South could transport their goods.