Page:Inland Transit - Cundy - 1834.djvu/70

 such expedient. Nevertheless, it has had also some injurious consequences. It will be easily understood, that an engine may possess great powers and capability of improvement, and yet fail upon a single trial; or it may fail even from accidental causes, unconnected with any defect either in its principle or in its details. The complete success of the engine furnished by Mr. Stephenson appears at once to have fascinated the directors; and whether intentionally or not, the fact is indisputable, that the monopoly of engines has ever since been secured to the manufacturer of this particular form of machine. Even when Mr. Stephenson was unable himself to supply engines as fast as the company required them, and other engine-makers were employed, it was under the most rigorous conditions, to construct the engines upon the same principle and in the same form, or nearly so, as that which Mr. Stephenson had adopted. Experience, the great parent of all invention and improvement, so far as the railroad afforded it, has thus been exclusively confined to one particular form of engine. Under the influence of this, a succession of improvements, as might have been expected, have been made by the ingenious inventors of the engine above described. These improvements consist partly in the relative proportion and strength of the parts, and partly in the arrangement of the cylinders and their action upon the wheels; but all have been suggested by the results of experiments, upon such a scale as was altogether unattainable, by any part of the vast stock of national talent excluded from the road by those measures of the directors, which limited the engines employed