Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/28

12 and perfecting of automatic machines. The public had been considerably startled by the first proposal to run railway trains without driver or stoker on the locomotive, but the proposition was generally regarded as a mere piece of clever advertising until actually carried out in the summer of '40, when a train of six passenger cars was run with speed and safety on the automatic principle from Detroit to Chicago. By an ingenious, yet simple mechanism, the signals were connected with electric contact makers, which acting on the engine levers stopped and started the train with perfect precision. Astonished indeed was the world to find that automatism could act as well as the trained intelligence of skilled drivers, nay better, for all chance of accident arising from carelessness, colour-blindness, or fog, was at once eliminated. This successful result gave a vast impetus to the credit and energy of the Yellow Creek Works; and the demand for self-acting machinery was increased tenfold. To make their engines self-feeding, self-supplying, even self-repairing, was now the object of every engineer in the company's service. Such was the eager competition in the work that many a warning of the