Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/130

118 of freight, and is still an increasingly important method of transportation in that department. Mr. Redfield, associated professionally with the "Steam Navigation Company," continued to apply himself to the improvement of the art, devising better forms of apparatus, seeking for the best methods of regulating steam navigation, which he did not find in legal enactments, inquiring into the causes of boiler explosions and suggesting means of safety, and calling attention to the value of steam in national defense.

While railroads were still an experiment in this country—the Albany and Schenectady Railroad having been completed only in 1826—Mr. Redfield, in 1829, published a pamphlet outlining a project for one system of railroads connecting the Atlantic with the Mississippi, in which he made useful the knowledge of the country which he had gained in his walk to Ohio. The route he indicated was substantially, as far as to the lakes, the one afterward followed by the New York and Erie Railroad. The Erie Canal was then popular, and seemed to respond to the public demand for quick transportation; and so the author set forth, under nineteen distinct heads, the superiority of railroads to canals a principle which was only a theory then, and to which men had to be won by argument. "He even anticipated," Prof. Olmsted observes, "that after the construction of the proposed great trunk railway connecting the Hudson and Mississippi, many lateral railways and canals would be built, which would bind in one vast network the whole great West to the Atlantic States. 'This great plateau, says he, will indeed one day be intersected by thousands of miles of railroad communications; and so rapid will be the increase of its population and resources that many persons now living will probably see most or all of it accomplished.' "

In 1832 Mr. Redfield was associated in the examination of the country through which the Harlem Railroad runs, with a view to establishing a road to Albany. He assisted in procuring a charter for the road, and published a pamphlet concerning it. He further assisted in the survey of a railroad route from New Haven to Hartford. He also showed his faith in street railroads, having as early as 1829 petitioned the Common Council of the City of New York for permission to lay an experimental track in Canal Street. At a later period he was a member of the Board of Directors under whom the Hudson River Railroad was completed.

While Mr. Redfield's fame rests mainly on his studies in meteorology, his contributions to geology were likewise important. Even as early as his journey to Ohio in 1810 he made geological observations. He was always much interested in the