Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

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Robert Edison Fulton Jr. (April 15, 1909 – May 7, 2004) was an American inventor and adventurer. He became famous for world travel by motorcycle in 1932–33, writing the book One Man Caravan, making a film about the trip, and earning more than 70 patents, many in aviation. He was also a professional photographer.

Biography
Fulton was born in Manhattan, New York. He was named after his father’s friend Thomas Edison; his father, Robert Edison Fulton Sr., was a president of Mack Trucks. His family had deep ties to transportation history, with relatives who ran stagecoach lines that later became Greyhound Bus Lines. As a teenager, Fulton flew commercially from Miami to Havana in 1921 and later to Egypt in 1923. He studied at Le Rosey in Switzerland, then Phillips Exeter Academy and Choate Rosemary Hall. He earned an architecture degree from Harvard in 1931 and studied architecture in Vienna at the University of Vienna. At 23, he spent 18 months riding a Douglas H32 Mastiff motorcycle from London to Tokyo to study architecture around the world, filming the journey with about 40,000 feet of film.

One Man Caravan and the journey
Upon his return, Fulton published One Man Caravan, recounting close shaves and adventures, including a near-shooting in the Khyber Pass, encounters with bandits in Iraq, a night in a Turkish jail, and visits with Indian rajahs. He lectured across the United States with film footage from his travels. In 1983, he released a 90-minute autofilmography, The One Man Caravan of Robert E. Fulton Jr., with his filmmaking sons. Later he revisited the journey in a program titled Twice Upon A Caravan.

Career and inventions
Fulton worked for Pan American Airways, using his cinematography skills to document the creation of Pan American Clipper routes across the Pacific just before World War II. He also started Continental Inc. to manufacture aeronautical equipment.

Inventions during and after World War II included the Aerostructor, the first ground-based aerial flight trainer. When the military showed little interest, he adapted it into the Gunairstructor, the first fixed aerial gunnery trainer. After the war, he designed the Fulton Airphibian, a plane that could convert to an automobile. Charles Lindbergh flew it in 1950; it became the first flying car certified as airworthy by the Civil Aeronautics Administration, though the project did not become a commercial success. The Airphibian is now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

In the 1950s Fulton developed the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system, also known as the Skyhook, used by the CIA, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Air Force to lift people from the ground by helicopter or plane. A Navy variant was named Seasled. The system remained in use by the U.S. military until 1996. Fulton also held many other aviation-related patents and was a prolific photographer.

Personal life and legacy
Fulton married Florence “Sally” Coburn in 1935, and they had three sons: Robert E. Fulton III (1939–2002), Travis Fulton, and Rawn Fulton. The couple divorced in 1982, and Fulton later married Anne Boireau Smith of Nantes, France. He died at his home in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2004.

Robert Edison Fulton Jr. is remembered as a bold inventor and traveler who combined engineering, filmmaking, and entrepreneurship to push the boundaries of aviation and mobility.