Great Inventions and Discoveries Part 2

Stephenson made what he called a traveling engine for the tramways leading from the mines where he worked to the sea, nine miles distant.

He named his engine "My Lord." On July 25, 1814, he made a successful trial trip with it.

The successful use of steam in hauling coal from the mines led thoughtful persons to consider its use for carrying merchandise and pa.s.sengers. At this time freight was transported inland by means of ca.n.a.ls. This method was slow; thirty-six hours were required for traveling fifty miles. Pa.s.sengers were conveyed by coaches drawn by horses. In 1821 a railroad for the transportation of merchandise and pa.s.sengers was opened between Stockton and Darlington in England. The line, including three branches, was thirty-eight miles long. The plan was to use animal power on this road, but George Stephenson secured permission to try on it his steam locomotive.

In September, 1825, the first train pa.s.sed over the road. It consisted of thirty-four cars weighing, all told, ninety tons. The train was pulled by Stephenson's engine, operated by Stephenson himself, with a signalman riding on horseback in advance. The train moved off at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and on certain parts of the road it reached a speed of fifteen miles per hour. The trial was a complete success.

The road had been built chiefly for the transportation of freight, but from the first pa.s.sengers insisted on being carried, and in October, 1825, the Company began to run a daily pa.s.senger coach called the "Experiment." This coach carried six persons inside and from fifteen to twenty outside. The round trip between Stockton and Darlington was made in two hours. A fare of one s.h.i.+lling was charged, and each pa.s.senger was allowed fourteen pounds of baggage free. The Stockton and Darlington was the first railway in the world over which pa.s.sengers and freight were hauled by steam.

Stephenson was next employed to help construct a railway between Liverpool and Manchester. The most eminent engineers of the day predicted that the road could not be built. But it was built. On the fifteenth of September, 1830, Stephenson made a trial trip over the road with an improved locomotive named the "Rocket." On the trial trip the "Rocket" made twenty-nine miles an hour. This trip firmly proved the possibilities of steam as motive power on railways and started the modern era of railroad building. Other railways were quickly built and soon they radiated from London to nearly every English seaport.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN EARLY RAILROAD TRAIN IN ENGLANDAN EARLY RAILROAD TRAIN IN ENGLAND]

Stephenson's son, Robert, a.s.sisted him in the construction of the "Rocket" and later attained considerable reputation as an engineer.

It is claimed that George Stephenson was the inventor of the safety lamp for use in mines, an invention usually accredited to Sir Humphry Davy. He was often consulted in the building of subsequent railroads, but he spent the last years of his life in farming and gardening at his home at Chesterfield, England, where he died August 12, 1848.

Before the days of railroads in America, freight was hauled on ca.n.a.ls and pa.s.sengers rode in stage coaches or on horseback. A coach made the trip from Boston to New York twice a week and the journey required six days. A trip from New York to Philadelphia took two days. From Philadelphia to Baltimore the roads were good, but south of Baltimore they were bad and even dangerous. South of the James River the traveler was compelled to make his journey on horseback. A coach from Charleston to Savannah was the only public conveyance south of the Potomac River.

In the days of the old colonial stagecoach, if a traveler wished to go from Boston to New York, he would have to be ready to begin the journey at three o'clock in the morning. The stage had no gla.s.s windows, no door or step, and pa.s.sengers were obliged to climb in at the front. One pair of horses pulled the stage eighteen miles, and then they were relieved by another pair. At about ten o'clock in the evening, after a day's journey of forty miles, the stage drew up at an inn for the night. At three o'clock the next morning, after dressing by the light of a horn lantern, the traveler must resume his journey. If the roads were bad, he might have to alight from the stage and help the driver pull the wheels out of the mud. Rivers were crossed on clumsy flat-boats. When the streams were swollen with rains or filled with floating ice, the pa.s.sage across was often dangerous. The trip from Boston to Philadelphia, which would have taken eight days of Was.h.i.+ngton's time, can easily be made now by train in as many hours. In these days of the modern railroad, San Francisco is nearer in time to New York than Was.h.i.+ngton was scarcely a hundred years ago.

The first railway in America was built in 1826. It connected a granite quarry at Quincy, Ma.s.sachusetts, with the town of Milton in the same state. It was only two or three miles long, and was operated with horses. In May, 1829, three English locomotives--the first ever seen in America--were unloaded at New York City. On August 9 of the same year, one of these engines was tried at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This was the first time that a locomotive ever turned a wheel on a railway in America.

A ca.n.a.l which the business men of Philadelphia proposed to construct from their city to Pittsburg, in order to give them access to the trade centers of the West, threatened the commercial prosperity of Baltimore.

To offset the advantages which this ca.n.a.l would give Philadelphia, at a great public meeting in Baltimore it was decided to build a railway from Baltimore to some point on the Ohio River. The road was named the Baltimore and Ohio. In 1830 it was finished from Baltimore as far as Ellicott's Mills, a distance of fifteen miles. The Baltimore and Ohio was the first railroad in the United States built for the express purpose of carrying pa.s.sengers and freight. The original intention was to pull cars over this road with horses. But Peter Cooper persuaded the railroad officials to try his engine "Tom Thumb," which he had built in 1829. The trial was successful, for "Tom Thumb" drew a car-load of pa.s.sengers at the rate of fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. This engine was the first locomotive built in America, and its trial was the first trip ever made by an American locomotive.

The first railroad in the United States constructed with the original purpose of using steam as motive power was the South Carolina railroad, a line one hundred thirty-six miles long between Charleston and Hamburg. A locomotive built in New York City, called the "Best Friend,"

made its first trip over this road in November, 1830. It was the first locomotive to run regularly on a railroad in the United States.

Railroad building spread rapidly in America, as it had in England. By 1835 there were twenty-two railroads in the United States, two of them being west of the Alleghenies, though no road was more than one hundred forty miles in length. There was no railroad west of the Mississippi River prior to 1853, and in that year a line only thirty-eight miles long was built. During 1906 alone, 5516 miles of railroad were constructed in the United States. At the end of that year, there was a total in the United States of 222,635 miles, or nearly enough to reach nine times around the entire globe. The United States now has thirty per cent. more miles of railway main track than all of Europe, and contains two fifths of the railroad mileage of the world. The railroads of the United States represent a value of about fifteen billion dollars, and give employment to a million and a half persons.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was originally owned by the state. Any one could use it by paying certain charges, and each person operating the road furnished his own cars, horses, and drivers. There were frequent blockades; when two cars going in opposite directions met, one had to turn back. If rival s.h.i.+ppers came together and neither was willing to yield to the other, a fight probably settled the rights of precedence.

After a time steam became the sole motive power, and the locomotives were owned by the state.

The railroad journeys of our grandfathers were very different from our own. In their day the rails were wooden beams or stringers laid on horizontal blocks of stone. Strips of iron were fastened with spikes to the tops of the wooden rails. The cars were small, each seating only a few pa.s.sengers. The locomotive was crude. Its greatest speed was about fifteen miles an hour. It could not climb a hill, and when a grade was reached, the cars had to be pulled up or let down with ropes managed by a stationary engine. No cab sheltered the engineer; no brake checked the speed. Sometimes the spikes fastening the iron strips to the tops of the wooden rails worked loose, and these strips curled up and penetrated the bottoms of the cars, greatly to the annoyance and fright of the traveler. The bridges in those days were roofed. The smokestack of the locomotive, being too tall to pa.s.s under the roof, was made in two joints or sections fastened together with hinges. When the train approached a bridge, the top section of the stack was lowered. As wood only was used for fuel, the stack emitted a shower of sparks, smoke, and hot cinders. The pa.s.sengers coughed and sputtered, and covered their eyes, mouths, and noses with handkerchiefs.

The trip from Chicago to New York is about a thousand miles, over prairie, river, and mountain. Should you make the journey between these cities over the Pennsylvania Railroad of to-day, there would be little danger of conflict because two rival trains might want the track at the same time. Nor would you have to wait while ropes pulled the train up a grade, for the locomotive can climb the hills. Instead of the old wooden rails with their strips of iron, there is a double track of solid steel rails all the way. The landscape would fly past you at the rate of a mile a minute, instead of fifteen miles an hour.

Let us suppose that you leave Chicago at 2.45 o'clock P.M., central time. Before the train starts you could telephone to a friend without leaving the car. You might sit down, in an elegant dining-car, to a dinner of all the delicacies the market could afford. You might occupy your own exclusive compartment in a luxuriously equipped Pullman car, lit by electric bulbs, or you could spend the evening reading the magazines, newspapers, and books provided in the train library. You might write at a comfortable desk with train stationery, or dictate letters and telegrams to the train stenographer. You are provided with hot and cold water, bathing facilities, and a barber shop. A maid could be summoned to the service of women and children; and a valet would be in attendance to sponge and press clothing over night. You would arrive in New York the next morning at 9.45 o'clock, having traveled the thousand miles in eighteen hours.

Simple as the idea of the sleeping-car is in reality, it was not introduced until 1858, when the Lake Sh.o.r.e Railroad ran the first crude and uncomfortable night-cars. George M. Pullman in 1859 set for himself the task of producing a palace car which should be used for continuous and comfortable travel through long distances by day and night. He remodelled into sleeping-cars two pa.s.senger coaches belonging to the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Though these cars fell far below the inventor's ideal, they were far in advance of the first make-s.h.i.+fts and in consequence created a demand for more and better cars of the same kind. In 1863, at his factory in Chicago, Pullman began the construction of the "Pioneer," the first of the Pullman palace cars.

This car was built at a cost of $18,000. It was first used in the funeral train which conveyed the body of President Lincoln to his burial place in Springfield, Illinois.

Few inventions have been financially so remunerative to the inventors as the Pullman palace car. It brought Mr. Pullman an immense fortune.

The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by Pullman in 1867, is one of the largest and most successful manufacturing concerns in America. It employs a capital of $40,000,000, gives work to fourteen thousand persons, furnishes sleeping-car service for 120,000 miles of railway, and operates over 2,000 cars. Mr. Pullman adopted plans for the vestibule car in 1887. He died at his home in Chicago, October 19, 1897.

The idea of the steamboat did not originate in the brain of Robert Fulton. It is claimed that, as early as 1543, Blasco de Garay propelled a boat by steam, and that in 1707, just a hundred years before the time of Fulton's _Clermont_, Papin ran a boat with steam on a river in Germany. In 1763 William Henry experimented with a steamboat on the Conistoga River in Pennsylvania.

James Rumsey, a Scotchman living in Maryland, is said to have been the first American to discover a method for running a vessel with steam against wind and tide. He conceived the idea in August, 1783. During 1785 he made his boat, and in 1786 he navigated it on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, Virginia, in the presence of hundreds of spectators.

He wrote to General Was.h.i.+ngton of his invention, and Was.h.i.+ngton wrote concerning it to Governor Johnson of Maryland. In 1839 Congress voted a gold medal to James Rumsey, Jr., son and only surviving child of the inventor, in recognition of the elder Rumsey's achievement.

In 1787 John Fitch exhibited on the Delaware River a vessel to be propelled by steam, and in 1790, from June to September, he ran a steamboat on that river between Philadelphia and Trenton. But he could not induce the public to patronize his boat, and for lack of business it had to be withdrawn.

Some British authorities claim that the first practical steamboat in the world was the tug "_Charlotte Dundas_," built by William Symmington, and tried in 1802 on the Clyde and Forth Ca.n.a.l in Scotland.

The trial was successful, but steam towing was abandoned for fear of injuring the banks of the ca.n.a.l. Symmington had built a small steamboat that traveled five miles an hour in 1788.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT FULTON]

To Robert Fulton, an American, belongs the credit for placing the steamboat on a successful commercial basis. Fulton was born at Little Britain, Pennsylvania, in 1765. At the age of seventeen he adopted the profession of portrait and landscape painter. At twenty-two he went to England to study art. There he met James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, and soon he began to give attention to mechanics. In 1793 he started to work on the idea of propelling boats by steam. He made an unsuccessful experiment with a steamboat on the Seine River in France. The vessel sank because its construction was faulty. Fulton returned to America and in New York harbor began to build another boat which he named the _Katherine of Clermont_, shortened to the _Clermont_. Her engine was procured from Boulton and Watt in England.

The boat was one hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, weighed one hundred sixty tons, and was equipped with side paddle wheels and a sheet-iron boiler. As the inventor worked patiently at his task, the newspapers gave him but little notice and the public ridiculed him.

The New York legislature had pa.s.sed a bill granting to Fulton and to Chancellor Livingston the exclusive right to navigate with steam boats the waters of New York State. This bill was a standing subject of ridicule among the legislators at Albany.

In August, 1807, the _Clermont_ was ready for her trial trip. A large crowd of spectators lined the banks of the Hudson as the boat slowly steamed out into the river. The crowd jeered and hooted and shouted at the vessel their nick-name of "Fulton's Folly." As the _Clermont_ moved up the river, making slow headway against the current, the crowd changed their jeers to expressions of wonder and finally to cheers.

The dry pine wood used for fuel sent out a cloud of thick, black smoke, flames, and sparks, which spread terror among the watermen of the harbor. The _Clermont_ made the voyage from New York up the Hudson to Chancellor Livingston's country estate near Albany, a distance of a hundred ten miles, in twenty-four hours. The trip was without mishap and it thoroughly established the practicability of steam for purposes of navigation.

Concerning this voyage Fulton wrote to a friend in Paris: "My steamboat voyage to Albany and back has turned out rather more favorably than I had calculated. The voyage was performed wholly by power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved.

The morning I left New York there were not thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move a mile an hour, or be of the least utility. While we were putting off from the wharf, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors. I feel infinite pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantages my country will derive from the invention."

The _Clermont_ was soon running as a regular packet between New York and Albany. The owners of sailing craft on the river hated her and tried to sink her. The New York legislature pa.s.sed a bill declaring that any attempt to destroy or injure the _Clermont_ should be a public offense punishable by fine and imprisonment. Then the enemies of the boat applied to the courts for an injunction restraining Fulton from navigating the Hudson with his steamboat. Daniel Webster appeared as Fulton's attorney. He won the case and secured for the _Clermont_ the full rights of the river.

Fulton afterward built other steamboats, including a system of steam ferries for New York City. In 1814 he constructed the first United States war steamer. Before constructing the _Clermont_, Fulton was interested in ca.n.a.ls and in the invention of machinery for spinning flax and twisting rope. He also made experiments with sub-marine explosives in England, France, and the United States; but these were considered failures. He died February 24, 1815.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CLERMONT ON THE HUDSON]

The first steamboat in the West was built at Pittsburg in 1811, and within a few years after the first trip of the _Clermont_, steamboats were being used on all the leading rivers of the country.

From the earliest times men had sailed the seas, but their s.h.i.+ps were small and slow and subject to wind, tide, and current. The success of the river steamboat led to the use of steam in ocean navigation. The first steams.h.i.+p to cross the Atlantic was the _Savannah_, in 1818.

The vessel relied almost as much upon wind as upon steam for motive power, but during the voyage of twenty-five days steam was used on eighteen days.

The wood required for fuel left little room in the vessel for freight.

With the advent of coal for fuel, and better machinery, steams.h.i.+ps grew in importance, and in 1837 two s.h.i.+ps, the _Sirius_ and the _Great Western_, crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York with the use of steam alone. By 1850 the average time for a trans-Atlantic voyage had been reduced to eleven or twelve days.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LUSITANIA OF THE CUNARD LINE]

If the old _Savannah_ could be placed beside the _Lusitania_, the giantess of the Cunard line of ocean steamers, a comparison would demonstrate the triumphs of the century in ocean navigation. If you were to cross the ocean on the _Lusitania_ or her sister-s.h.i.+p the _Mauretania_, you would enter a vast floating mansion seven hundred ninety feet long, eighty-eight feet wide, eighty-one feet high from keel to boat deck, and weighing thirty-two thousand five hundred tons.

Her height to the mastheads is two hundred sixteen feet; each of her three anchors weighs ten tons; and her funnels are so large that a trolley car could easily run through them. The _Lusitania_ has accommodation for three thousand pa.s.sengers, officers, and crew, and is driven by mighty turbine engines of sixty-eight thousand horse power. The steamer was built at a cost of $7,500,000. She has traveled the three thousand miles across the Atlantic in about four and a half days--the quickest trans-Atlantic voyage ever made. She moves through the great waves of the ocean with such steadiness that pa.s.sengers can scarcely tell whether they are on water or land. A telephone system connects all parts of the s.h.i.+p; there are electric elevators, a special nursery in which children may play; a gymnasium for exercise, shower baths, and an acre and a half of upper deck. There are five thousand electric lights, requiring two hundred miles of wire.

Wireless telegraphy flashes messages to the moving s.h.i.+p from distant parts of the world, and bears back greetings from her pa.s.sengers. A daily ill.u.s.trated newspaper of thirty-two pages is published on board s.h.i.+p.

CHAPTER IV

ELECTRICITY: THE TELEGRAPH AND THE TELEPHONE

The great miracle of the twentieth century is electricity. If the printing press is the brain of civilization and the steam engine is its heart, electric wires are its nervous system. Steam is a giant; electricity is a witch. There is something uncanny about it. Man writes volumes about electricity; calls it positive and negative and measures it in ohms and volts; gives courses to explain it in his schools and universities; kills criminals, cures the sick, and scatters darkness with it; makes it whirl him through s.p.a.ce; compels it to bear his whisper through hundreds of miles, and can make it fly around the entire earth with his written word--and yet no man knows what electricity is. Electricity exists, and has always existed, from the back of a cat to the infinite arch of the sky.