Weston M. Fulton, an Alabama native who had earned the bachelor’s degree from the University of Mississippi where his uncle was president, moved to Knoxville in 1898 to be the weather forecaster at the Weather Bureau Station, which had moved to the UT campus earlier in 1898 at the request of President Dabney. The United States Weather Bureau had recently implemented a program at universities to train meteorologists, and Fulton was to establish the curriculum at UT. Fulton established the weather station in the tower of Old College and taught the course in meteorology, making the university the first in the South to have a course in meteorology in its Agriculture Department. While on campus he took courses in engineering with Dr. Charles Perkins and received the master’s degree in 1902, becoming a charter member of Phi Kappa Phi.
In the course of his studies, he began experimenting with the use of changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature for motive power. From his studies came his best-known invention, a device for thermostatic control of temperature—the sylphon. He drew the name of the sylphon bellows from Paracelsus’ coinage of the word sylph in the 1400s to describe mystical beings in the air. The bellows was developed in response to his musings about whether there could be a machine that accurately measured the rise and fall of rivers, and his desire to develop a clock that could be wound daily by the change in temperature between night and day. Investors John Scruggs Brown and P. J. Briscoe provided funds to found the Fulton Company (later Robertshaw Controls, and then a division of Siebe) in 1903, and Fulton left the university to join Brown in the business in 1904. When Fulton was ready to build his first machines, an arrangement was made whereby he paid the university for use of power and facilities, and he built his first equipment in UT shops during the summer vacation. In 1914 the Fulton Company moved to the site between the main and agriculture campuses.
The sylphon is or has been used in such products as thermostats, controls for hot water heaters, and controls for jet fuel in aircraft engines. In the fight against the submarine in World War I, Fulton’s collapsible bellows was used to determine the depth at which a bomb exploded. In World War II, among the Fulton Company’s essential products were bellows assemblies for bombsights, ships, and planes; and brass shell casings, produced on-site. So important was the Fulton Company in the war effort that President Roosevelt personally presented a certificate of appreciation to Fulton in 1945 for his and the company’s impacts upon American industry. Fulton sent so many inventions to the US Patent Office that the office had to add another room to hold his patents, about 125 in all, and he was widely called the “Edison of the South.”
In 1923 Fulton was elected to Knoxville’s City Council and became the city’s first vice mayor, but was not reelected in 1927.
In 1927 President Harcourt Morgan convinced Fulton not to sell land he owned on the north side of Cumberland for a filling station and to sell that land and other parcels that he had acquired at a total cost of $300,000 to be used for university expansion. Morgan convinced the Knox County Court to issue bonds to allow the university to repay Fulton. In 1928, the same year he was named to UT’s Athletic Council, Fulton quietly (on behalf of UT) bought property along what is now Volunteer Boulevard, including Temple Court, and the McCleneghan, and Robert S. Young residences. These, and a large lot behind his own residence, he sold to UT for his cost of $239,000, with UT having 10 years to pay at 6 percent interest. In 1930 Fulton made a gift to the university of $50,000 to allow purchase of his residence, which UT had leased since 1928.
His residence was to be used as the Weston Fulton Jr. Memorial Infirmary, honoring Fulton’s son who was killed in a traffic accident on Kingston Pike while he was a UT freshman. The Fulton house had several UT uses before being razed to allow construction of a new student union.
The Weston Miller Fulton Scholarship was established in 2005 in the College of Engineering by Fulton’s daughter Jean and her husband, Jim Talley.