Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 07.djvu/494

RAILWAYS use among the coal mines in the north of England and Scotland, and then it became a practice to link the cars together into trains. The next improvement was putting the flanges on the wheels instead of on the rails.

The invention of the steam engine drew the attention of inventors to the possibility of devising an engine which should serve as a motive power for the cars instead of the horses. The first man to complete a practicable locomotive was Richard Trevethick. In 1802 he took out a patent for a wheeled engine which should run on rails by its own power, and exhibited a model of it in London. Two years later, in 1804, he produced a steam carriage which hauled ten tons of coal along the rails at a speed of five miles an hour. It was the first locomotive, and although a success as far as it went, a considerable period passed before further experiments were made. This was due to the fixed belief among engineers that a smooth wheel could not draw a heavy load along a smooth track up an incline. It was not till 1812 that a small locomotive was put to practical use in drawing carloads of coal from the neighboring collieries to the city of Leeds, in the north of England. Trevethick, meanwhile, had lost interest in his invention.

In 1814 George Stephenson, an engineer, built a locomotive and put it in operation near Killingsworth, and demonstrated that it could draw heavy loads up an incline; his engine pulled 35 tons up an incline at a speed of four miles an hour. Yet it was not till 1825 that the first demonstration of a railway train in motion was given, on the Stockton-Darlington railway. On this occasion the locomotive, the product of Stephenson's genius, drew 22 cars filled with passengers, and 12 cars filled with coal, altogether 90 tons, at a speed of from five to twelve miles an hour.

In the following year a railway was begun between Manchester and Liverpool, a distance of thirty miles, and Oct. 1, 1829, was fixed as the day on which a grand competition was to be held between inventors of locomotives. Four engines appeared, two of which had been built by Stephenson and John Ericsson, the later subsequently becoming famous in this country as the inventor of the “Monitor.” For fourteen days the trials continued, Stephenson's engine being finally accepted as the superior one.

The Manchester-Liverpool railway was opened for passenger and freight traffic in 1830, and immediately proved a big success. The great railway system was thereby inaugurated.

Railway promotion now assumed the

proportions of a boom and spread to other countries, in spite of the opposition of the sceptical and the owners of canals. It is said that the King of France at this time sent one of his most capable ministers to investigate the new institution. On his return this functionary reported:

“Sire,” he said, “railways may prove beneficial in England, but they are not adapted to conditions in France.” Thus have many beneficial inventions been handicapped by the bigoted.

In the United States horse tramways, the predecessors of railways, were in use as early as 1807, when one was put in operation along Beacon Street, in Boston, for passenger service. The first railway on which a steam locomotive was utilized was laid in Pennsylvania, from Carbondale to Honesdale, a distance of sixteen miles, built by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Co., in 1829, when a locomotive for use on the road was imported from England. The first railway built in the United States especially for the purpose of steam traffic was the one begun in South Carolina, in 1830. Another road was built by the Baltimore and Ohio Railway Co., from Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills, Md., a distance of fifteen miles, being finished in 1830.

As in England, so in the United States there now began an era of railway construction which spread all over the country, with even more revolutionary effects in this country than in England. Lines were pushed out into howling wildernesses, not to accommodate an existing population and industry, as was the case in England, but for the definite purpose of developing population and industry in the future. Isolated settlements of pioneers suddenly found themselves facing the possibility of marketing their farm produce in the big communities near the seacoast and along the waterways, and extended their agricultural enterprises accordingly. Land hitherto valueless on account of its distance from civilization suddenly acquired a growing potential value, for railway transportation would bring its products within easy reach of the centers of population. The imagination of the more ambitious elements of the people were inflamed with these prospects, and a general migratory movement of the people began westward, followed by the railroads, sometimes actually preceded by them. The coal mines, too, suddenly found the whole populated part of the country thrown open to them as a market, and the coal industry began to experience a tremendous stimulus. With the possibility of receiving coal, small manufactories began springing up all over the Eastern States, along the