Cut down considerably from today’s Times:
Robert E. Fulton Jr., an adventurous inventor whose more than 70 patents included a car that could fly and a rescue system for spies behind enemy lines that was used by the C.I.A. and a James Bond movie, died on Friday at his home in Newtown, Conn. He was 95.
Mr. Fulton’s adventures started early. When he was a child, according to relatives and published accounts, his family took him on a commercial flight from Miami to Havana in 1921, and in 1923 to Egypt when King Tut’s tomb was opened. He built his first car as a high school student in Switzerland, won three events for Harvard at its track meet with Yale in 1931, and traveled 25,000 zigzag miles, most of the way around the world, on a motorcycle when he was 24, according to contemporary accounts. His flying car, which he named the Airphibian, was thought by its advocates to be a postwar necessity: an airplane in every garage. The plane could be converted into a car in less than five minutes, chiefly by removing its wings and propeller. It used the same controls for flying and driving, traveled 50 miles per hour on the ground and 110 in the air, and got 25 miles to the gallon. Three years after its first flight in 1947, it became the first flying car to be certified by the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the precursor to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Mr. Fulton’s aerial rescue system, called Skyhook, was modeled on British railway mailbag pickups and was used by the military, secretly, to grab espionage agents off the ground during the cold war. It was also used in “Thunderball,” one of the James Bond spy/thriller movies. He invented a related system, called Seasled, to recover frogmen for the Navy.
After attending school in Lausanne, Switzerland, he went to Exeter and Choate, graduated from Harvard with a degree in architecture, and went to Vienna for a further year of architectural study. For a year and a half, he rode a modified Douglas twin-cylinder motorcycle with a .32-caliber revolver hidden beneath the crankcase and a straw sun helmet on a rack between his handlebars. He spent a night in a Turkish jail, dodged bandits in Iraq, was shot at by Pathan tribesmen in the Khyber Pass and was entertained by Indian rajahs. He wrote a book about the trip, “One Man Caravan” (Harcourt, Brace, 1937), which the New York Times reviewer, Edward Frank Allen, considered informative and refreshingly modest.
During World War II, he developed one of the first ground-based aerial flight trainers, but there were no takers. So he converted it to what many believed was the first fixed aerial gunnery trainer. He delivered more than 500 to the Navy and the Army Air Corps. He learned to fly in order to write the manual for the trainer, according to the article in The American. In his later years, Mr. Fulton perfected and sold Skyhook, his air rescue system, designed and built a special wheelchair to allow disabled people access to airlines, made films, and completed poetry and sculpture, among other things.