rendered. At Newcastle, the centre of the mining country, a dinner was
given in his honor, and a service of plate, worth over twelve thousand
dollars, was presented to him. The Emperor of Russia sent him a
magnificent silver-gilt vase, with a letter congratulating him on his
great achievement, and the King of England made him a baronet.
Davy himself, in spite of his reputation as a chemist, placed this
invention above all his other work. “I value it more than anything I
ever did,” said he. “It was the result of a great deal of
investigation and labor; but if my directions be attended to, it will
save the lives of thousands of poor men. I was never more affected
than by a written address which I received from the working colliers
when I was in the north, thanking me on behalf of themselves and their
families for the preservation of their lives.”
Davy’s note-books are most interesting reading and show the
philosophic trend of his thoughts. At one time he said, “Whoever
wishes to enjoy peace, and is gifted with great talents, must labor
for posterity. In doing this he enjoys all the pleasures of
intellectual labor, and all the desire arising from protracted hope.
He feels no envy nor jealousy; his mark is too far distant to be seen
by short-sighted malevolence, and therefore it is never aimed at....
To raise a chestnut on the mountain, or a palm in the plain, which may
afford shade, shelter, and fruit for generations yet unborn, and
which, if they have once fixed their roots, require no culture, is
better than to raise annual flowers in a garden, which must be watered
daily, and in which a cold wind may chill or too ardent a sunshine may
dry.... The best faculties of man are employed for futurity: speaking
is better than acting, writing is better than speaking.”
He was fond of travel, and after he had seen the successful use of his
lamp he went abroad again. When he returned he was made president of
the Royal Society, a position which had been made illustrious by Sir
Isaac Newton. The British navy asked him to discover what could be
done to prevent the corrosion of copper sheathing on vessels, caused
by salt water. He made experiments, and at last succeeded in rendering
the copper negatively electrical by the use of small pieces of tin,
zinc, or iron nails. But shells and seaweed would adhere to the
non-corroded surface, and hence the process was not entirely
successful. This principle of galvanic protection, however, was found
to be applicable to many other purposes.
These and other experiments in chemistry and electricity, travel, and
his duties as president of the Royal Society filled his days. In 1826
he was attacked by paralysis, and from then he spent much of his time
on the continent, seeking health and strength. He wrote on fishing and
on travel, and all his writings, on whatever theme he touched, are
filled with the love of nature and of beauty, and permeated with that
philosophic balance that had been characteristic of his whole career.
He died in Geneva, May 29, 1829.
Davy was not the born inventor, drawn irresistibly to construct
something new. He was the born chemist, and it was only when he was
asked to investigate the nature of the fire-damp that he fell to
studying whether some adequate protection could not be afforded the
miners. Yet he himself said that he was more proud of his safety-lamp
than of all his other discoveries, and although the scientists and
chemists may think of Humphrey Davy as a great experimenter, great
lecturer, and great writer on chemistry and electricity, the world at
large knows him best for his safety-lamp and for the great change for
the better he was able to bring about in the mines of England.
IX
STEPHENSON AND THE LOCOMOTIVE
1781-1848
The need of finding a new way of working the coal mines of England,
and of marketing the coal, which had been such an important factor in
the development of the steam-engine, was a scarcely less important
factor in the building of the earliest practical railway locomotive.
The coal had to be hauled from the pit of the colliery to the shipping
place. It was carried in cars that were pushed or pulled over a rude
line of wooden or iron rails. But it was evident from the time when
James Watt began to build his steam-engines to lift the coal from the
mine that men of inventive minds would soon seek to send the cars over
the level ground by the same power. We owe the railroad chiefly to the
needs of the north of England, and there we find the real birth of the
locomotive.
About the beginning of the nineteenth century a number of men in
England were experimenting with new means of locomotion, both for
merchandise and for passengers. Their projects varied from cars
running on wheels and drawn by horses to carriages propelled by small
stationary steam-engines, placed at short distances from each other
along the road. In 1802 Richard Trevethick, a captain in a Cornish
tin-mine, took out a patent for a steam-carriage. The machine he built
looked like an ordinary stage-coach on four wheels. It had one
horizontal cylinder, which was placed in the rear of the hind axle,
together with the boiler and the furnace-box. The motion of the piston
was carried to a separate crank-axle, and that in turn gave the motion
to the axle of the driving-wheel. This was in itself a great
invention, being the first really successful high-pressure engine that
was built on the principle of moving a piston by the elasticity of
steam against only the pressure of the air. The steam was admitted
from the boiler under the piston that moved in a cylinder, and forced
it upward. When the motion had reached its limit, the communication
between the piston and the under side of the cylinder was shut off,
and the steam escaped into the atmosphere. Then a passage was opened
between the boiler and the upper end of the piston, which was
consequently pushed downward, and then the steam was again allowed to
escape. As a result the power of the engine was equal to the
difference between the atmosphere’s pressure and the elastic force of
the steam in the boiler.
This steam-carriage of Trevethick was fairly successful, and created a
great sensation in that part of Cornwall where it was built. He
decided to take it to London, and drove it himself to Plymouth, from
which port it was to be carried by sea. On the road it caused
amazement and consternation, and won the name of Captain Trevethick’s
dragon. He exhibited it in London, but after a short time gave up
driving it, believing that the roads of England were too badly built
to make the use of a steam-carriage feasible.
Other men were working on similar lines. Among them was the owner of a
colliery in the north named Blackett, who built a number of engines
for propelling coal-cars and used them at his mines. But these were
very clumsy and heavy, moved slowly, and had to be continually
repaired at considerable expense, so that other miners, after
examining Blackett’s engines, decided they were not worth the cost of
manufacture. To make the steam-carriage really serviceable it must be
more efficient and reliable.
Meantime a young man named George Stephenson, who was working at a
coal mine at Killingworth, seven miles north of Newcastle, was
studying out a new plan of locomotive. His father had been a fireman
in a colliery at Wylam, a village near Newcastle, and there the son
George was born on June 9, 1781. He had lived the life of the other
boys of the village, had been a herd-boy to care for a neighbor’s
cows, had been a “picker” in the colliery, and separated stones and
dross from the coal, had risen to assistant fireman, then fireman,
then engineman. He was strong and vigorous, fond of outdoor sports,
and also considerable of a student. In time he moved to Willington
Quay, a village on the River Tyne, where coal was shipped to London.
Here he married, and made his home in a small cottage near the quay.
He was in charge of a fixed engine on Willington Ballast Hill that
drew the trains of laden coal-cars up the incline.
After he had worked for three years at Willington he was induced to
take the position of brakesman of the engine at the West Moor Colliery
at Killingworth. He had only been settled in his new place a short
time when his wife died, leaving him with a son Robert. Stephenson
thenceforth threw himself into his work harder than ever, studying
with his son as the boy grew older, and spending a great deal of time
over his plans for a steam-engine that should move the coal-cars. He
knew the needs of the colliery perfectly, had acquired a good
knowledge of mechanics, and proposed to put his knowledge to account.
He had already, as engine-wright of the Killingworth Colliery, applied
the surplus power of a pumping steam-engine to the work of drawing
coal from the deeper workings of the mine, thereby saving a great
amount of manual and horse labor. When the coal was drawn up it had to
be transported to the quays along the Tyne, and to simplify this
Stephenson laid down inclined planes so that a train of full wagons
moving down the incline was able to draw up another train of empty
wagons. But this would only work over a short distance, and was in
itself a small saving in effort.
The engines that Mr. Blackett had built, using Trevethick’s model as a
basis, were working daily near the Killingworth Colliery, and
Stephenson frequently went over to see them. He studied Mr. Blackett’s
latest locomotive, nicknamed “Black Billy,” with the greatest care,
and then told his friend Jonathan Foster that he was convinced that he
could build a better engine than Trevethick’s, one that would work
more effectively and cheaply and draw a train of cars more steadily.
He also had the advantage of seeing other primitive locomotives that
were being tried at different places near Newcastle. One of these,
known as Blenkinsop’s Leeds engine, ran on a tramway, and would draw
sixteen wagons with a weight of seventy tons at the rate of about
three miles an hour. But the Blenkinsop engine was found to be very
unsteady, and tore up the tram-rails, and when its boiler blew up the
owner decided that the engine was not worth the cost of repair.
Stephenson, however, drew some useful points from it, as well as from
each of the other models he saw, and proposed to himself to follow
Watt’s example in constructing his steam-engine, namely, to combine
the plans and discoveries of other inventors in a machine of his own,
and so achieve a more complete success.
Stephenson was now very well regarded at the colliery for the
improvements he had made there. He brought the matter of building a
new “Traveling Engine,” as he called it, to the attention of the
lessees of the mine in 1813. Lord Ravensworth, the principal partner,
formed a favorable opinion of Stephenson’s plans, and agreed to supply
him with the funds necessary to build a locomotive.
With his support Stephenson went to work to choose his tools and
workmen. He had to devise and make many of the tools he needed, and to
train his men specially for this business. He built his first engine
in the workshops at the West Moor Mine. It followed to some extent the
model of Blenkinsop’s engine. It had a cylindrical boiler, eight feet
long and thirty-four inches in diameter, with an internal flue tube
passing through it. The engine had two vertical cylinders and worked
the propelling gear with cross-heads and connecting-rods. The power of
the two cylinders was carried by means of spur-wheels, which continued
the motive power to the wheels that supported the engine on the rails.
The engine was simply mounted on a wooden frame that was supported on
four wheels. These wheels were smooth, as Stephenson was convinced
that smooth wheels would run properly on an edge-rail.
This engine, christened the “Blutcher,” and taking about ten months to
build, was tried on the Killingworth Railway on July 25, 1814. It
proved to be the most successful working engine that had yet been
built, and would pull eight loaded wagons of about thirty tons’ weight
up a slight grade at the rate of four miles an hour. For some time it
was used daily at the colliery.
But the “Blutcher” was after all a very clumsy machine. The engine had
no springs, and its movement was a series of jolts, that injured the
rails and shook the machinery apart. The important parts of the
machinery were huddled together, and caused friction, and the
cog-wheels soon became badly worn. Moreover the engine moved scarcely
faster than a horse’s walk, and the expense of running it was very
little less than the cost of horse-power. Stephenson saw that he must
in some way increase the power of his engine if he was to provide a
new motive power for the mines.
In this first engine the steam had been allowed to escape into the air
with a loud, hissing noise, which frightened horses and cattle, and
was generally regarded as a nuisance. Stephenson thought that if he
could carry this steam, after it had done its work in the cylinders,
into the chimney by means of a small pipe, and allow it to escape in a
vertical direction, its velocity would be added to the smoke from the
fire, or the rising current of air in the chimney, and would in that
way increase the draught, and as a result the intensity of combustion
in the furnace. He tried this experiment, and found his conjecture
correct; the blast stimulated combustion, consequently the capability
of the boiler to generate steam was greatly increased, and the power
of the engine increased in the same proportion. No extra weight was
added to the machine. The invention of this steam blast was almost the
turning point in the history of the locomotive. Without it the engine
would have been too clumsy and slow for practical use, but with it the
greatest possibilities of use appeared.
Encouraged by the success of his steam blast Stephenson started to
build a second locomotive. In this he planned an entire change in
mechanical construction, his principal objects being the use of as few
parts as possible, and the most direct possible application of power
to the wheels. He took out a patent for this engine on February 28,
1815. This locomotive had two vertical cylinders that communicated
directly with each pair of the four wheels that supported the engine,
by means of a cross-head and a pair of connecting-rods. “Ball and
socket” joints were used to make the union between the ends of the
cross-heads where they united with the connecting-rods, and between
the rods and the crank-pins attached to each driving-wheel. The
mechanical skill of his workmen was not equal to the forging of all
the necessary parts as Stephenson had devised them, and he was obliged
to make use of substitutes which did not always work smoothly, but he
finally succeeded in completing a locomotive which was a vast
improvement on all earlier ones, and that was notable for the simple
and direct communication between the cylinders and the wheels, and the
added power gained by using the waste steam in the steam blast. This
second locomotive of Stephenson’s was in the main the model for all
those built for a considerable time.
During the time when Stephenson was working on his second locomotive
explosions of fire-damp were unusually frequent in the coal mines of
Northumberland and Durham, and for a space he turned his attention to
the possibility of inventing some pattern of safety-lamp. The result
was his perfection of a lamp that would furnish the miners with
sufficient light and yet preclude risk of exploding fire-damp. This
came to be known as the “Geordie Lamp,” to distinguish it from the
“Davy Lamp” that Sir Humphrey Davy was inventing at about the same
time. The lamp was used successfully by the miners at Killingworth,
and was considered by many as superior to Davy’s lamp. Disputes arose
as to which was invented first, and long controversies between
scientific societies, most of which sided with the friends of Davy.
Stephenson himself stated his claims firmly, but without rancor, and
when he saw that it prevented the accidents in mines was satisfied
that he had gained his object, and returned to the more absorbing
subject of locomotives.
He realized that the road and the rails were almost as important as
the engine itself. At that time the railways were laid in the most
careless fashion, little attention was paid to the rails’ proper
joining, and less to the grades of the roads. Stephenson laid down new
rails at Killingworth with “half-lap joints,” or extending over each
other for a certain distance at the ends, instead of the “butt joints”
that were formerly used. Over these both the coal-cars drawn by horses
and his locomotive ran much more smoothly. To increase this smoothness
of travel he added a system of spring carriage to his engine, and
saved it from the jolting that had handicapped his first model.
The second locomotive was proving so efficient at the Killingworth
Colliery that friends of the inventor urged him to look into the
possible use of steam in traveling on the common roads. To study this
he made an instrument called the dynamometer, which enabled him to
calculate the resistance of friction to which carriages would be
exposed on railways. His experiments made him doubtful of the
possibility of running such railroads, unless a great amount of very
expensive tunneling and grading were first done.
All this time George Stephenson continued to study with his son
Robert. The boy was employed at the colliery, and was rapidly learning
the business under the skilful charge of his father. Stephenson had
decided however that Robert should have a better education than had
been his, and in 1820 took him from his post as viewer in the West
Moor Pit, and sent him to the University of Edinburgh.
News spread slowly in England in that day, and the fact that a steam
locomotive was being successfully used at Killingworth attracted very
little attention in the rest of the country. Even in the neighborhood
of the mines people soon grew used to seeing “Puffing Billy,” as the
engine was called, traveling back and forth from the pit to the quay,
and took it quite for granted. Here and there scattered scientific
men, ever since Watt’s perfection of the steam-engine, had considered
the possibility of travel by steam, but practical business men had
failed to come forward to build a railway line. At length, however,
Edward Pease, of Darlington, planned a road to run from Stockton to
Darlington, and set about building it. He had a great deal of
difficulty in forming a company to finance it, but he was a man of
much perseverance, and at length he succeeded. While he was doing this
Stephenson was patiently building new locomotives, and trying to
induce the mine-owners along the Tyne to replace their horse-cars with
his engines. In 1819 the owners of the Hetton Colliery decided to make
this change, and asked Stephenson to take charge of the construction
of their line. He obtained the consent of the Killingworth owners, and
began work. On November 18, 1822, the Hetton Railway was opened. Its
length was about eight miles, and five of Stephenson’s locomotives
were working on it, under the direction of his brother Robert. In
building this line George Stephenson was thoroughly practical.
Although he knew that his name was becoming more and more identified
with the locomotive engine, he did not hesitate to use stationary
engines wherever he considered that they would be more economical. In
the Hetton Railway, which ran for a part of its distance through rough
country, he used stationary engines wherever he could not secure
grades that would make locomotives practicable. His own steam-engines
traveled over this line at the rate of about four miles an hour, and
each was able to draw a train of seventeen coal wagons, weighing about
sixty-four tons.
The coal mines of the Midlands and the north of England had been the
original inducement to inventors to build engines that would draw
cars, and the manufacturing needs of Manchester and Liverpool were now
gradually inducing promoters to consider building railroads. The
growth of Manchester and the towns close to it was tremendous, the
cotton traffic between Manchester and Liverpool had jumped to enormous
figures, and men felt that some new method of communication must be
found. Robert Fulton’s friend, the Duke of Bridgewater, had been of
some help with his canal system, but the trade quickly outstripped
this service. Then William James, a man of wealth and influence, a
large landowner and coal-operator, took up the subject of a Liverpool
and Manchester Railway with some business friends, and had a survey of
such a line begun. His men met with every possible resistance from the
country people, who had no wish to have “Puffing Billys” racing
through their fields; bogs had to be crossed and hills leveled; and it
soon appeared that the cost of a road would be very expensive. The
local authorities gave James and his associates some encouragement,
but those members of Parliament he approached were more or less
opposed to his plans. The time was not yet quite ripe for the road,
but the needs of trade were growing more and more pressing.
Meantime Mr. Pease was again growing eager to build his Darlington and
Stockton line. Near the end of the year 1821 two men called at his
house. One introduced himself as Nicholas Wood, viewer at
Killingworth, and then presented his companion, George Stephenson, of
the same place. Stephenson had letters to Mr. Pease, and after a talk
with him, persuaded him to go to the Killingworth Colliery and see his
locomotives. Pease was much impressed with the engines he saw there,
and even more with Stephenson’s ability as a practical engineer. The
upshot of the matter was that Pease reported the results of his visit
to the directors of his company, and they authorized him to secure
Stephenson’s services in surveying the line they wished to build. He
took up the work, made careful surveys and reports, and was finally
directed to build a railway according to his own plans. This he did,
working with the best corps of assistants and the most efficient
materials he could find. When the line was nearly completed he made a
tour of inspection over it with his son and a young man named John
Dixon. Dixon later recalled that Stephenson said to the two as they
came to the end of their trip, “Now, lads, I will tell you that I
think you will live to see the day, though I may not live so long,
when railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of
conveyance in this country--when mail coaches will go by railway, and
railroads will become the Great Highway for the king and all his
subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man
to travel on a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great
and almost insurmountable difficulties that will have to be
encountered; but what I have said will come to pass as sure as we
live.”