Jubilee Memorial of the Railway System; A History of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and a Record of Its Results (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE DA WN OF THE NE W ERA. It is a common error to suppose that there were neither railways nor locomotives before the era of George Stephen- son, Edward Pease, and the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The fact is, that mechanical locomotion, by the adhesion of the rim of a loaded wheel to the surface upon which it rolled, while being forced to revolve by some tangential force, is very old. Camus, who was born in 1672, and died in 1732, had in 1729 made an automaton coach and horses for Louis XIV. Other mechanicians had made automata which were supplied with power by the relaxation of a wound-up spring. We find, again, that in 1759 the possibility of producing locomotion on land by steam-power was suggested by Dr Robison of Scotland; and in 1772 Oliver Evans, in America, promulgated the same theory in relation to the engine with which his name is identified. James Watt, the principal inventor of the steam-engine, patented in 1784 an application of his engine to the movement of carriages. His patent, however, was allowed to lapse without coming to any practical result, and it has been contended by men of science that the condensing- engine, which was Watt's special favourite, was not quite applicable to locomotive purposes. Vide Practical Mechanics' Journal, May 1865. The First Locomotive. Symington, again, proposed steam locomotion in 1784, and actually succeeded in applying it to the purposes of navigation, under the auspices of Mr Millar of Dalswinton, in Dumfriesshire. In the following year Symington prepared plans for the construction at the Carron Works of an engine of twelve-horse power; and this engine, when fitted up in a strong boat, succeeded in drawing barges along the Forth and Clyde Canal at the rate of nearly seven miles an hour. ...