William Doolittle - Inventions in the Century

Persistent efforts continued to be made to introduce a practical steam road carriage in England until 1827. After Trevithick followed Blenkinsop, who made a locomotive which ran ten miles an hour. Then came Julius Griffith, in 1821, of Brompton, who patented a steam carriage which was built by Joseph Bramah, one of the ablest mechanics of his time. Gordon, Brunton and Gurney attempted a curious and amusing steam carriage, resembling a horse in action – having jointed legs and feet, but this animal was not successful. Walter Hancock, in 1827, was one of the most persistent and successful inventors in this line; but bad roads and an unsympathetic public discouraged inventors in their efforts to introduce steam road carriages, and their attention was turned to the locomotive to run on rails or tracks especially prepared for them. Wooden and iron rails had been introduced a century before for heavy cars and wagons in pulling loads from mines and elsewhere, but when at the beginning of the century it had been found that the engines of Watt could be used to drag such loads, it was deemed necessary to make a rail having its top surface roughened with ridges and the wheels of the engine and cars provided with teeth or cogs to prevent anticipated slipping.

In England, Blackett and George Stephenson discovered that the adhesion of smooth wheels to smooth rails was sufficient. Without overlooking the fact that William Hendley built and operated a locomotive called the Puffing Billy in 1803, and Hackworth one a little later, yet to the genius of Stephenson is due chiefly the successful introduction of the modern locomotive. His labours and inventions continued from 1812 for twenty years, and culminated at two great trials: the first one on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1829, when he competed with Hackworth and Braithwaite and Ericsson, and with the Rocket won the race; and the second at the opening of the same road in 1830, when with the Northumbrian , at the head of seven other locomotives and a long train of twenty-eight carriages, in which were seated six hundred passengers, he ran the train successfully between the two towns.

On this occasion Mr. Huskisson, Home Secretary in the British Cabinet, while the cars were stopping to water the engines, and he was out on the track talking with the Duke of Wellington, was knocked down by one of the engines and had one of his legs crushed. Placed on board of the Northumbrian , it was driven at the rate of thirty-six miles an hour by Stephenson to Eccles. Mr. Huskisson died there that night. This was its first victim, and the greatest speed yet attained by a locomotive.

The year 1829 therefore can be regarded as the commencement of the life of the locomotive for transportation of passengers. The steam blast thrown into the smokestack by Hackworth, the tubular boiler of Seguin and the link motion of Stephenson were then, as they now are, the essential features of locomotives.

In the meantime America had not been idle. The James Watt of America, Oliver Evans, in 1804 completed a flat-bottomed boat to be used in dredging at the Philadelphia docks, and mounting it on wheels drove it by its own steam engine through the streets to the river bank. Launching the craft, he propelled it down the river by using the same engine to drive the paddle wheels. He gave to this engine the strange name of Oruktor Amphibolos .

John C. Stevens of New Jersey was, in 1812, urging the legislature of the State of New York to build railways, and asserting that he could see nothing to hinder a steam carriage from moving with a velocity of one hundred miles an hour. In 1829 George Stephenson in England had made for American parties a locomotive called The Stourbridge Lion , which in that year was brought to America and used on the Delaware and Hudson R. R. by Horatio Allen. Peter Cooper in the same year constructed a locomotive for short curves, for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Returning now to steam navigation: – Symington again entered the field in 1801-2 and constructed for Lord Dundas a steamboat, named after his wife, the Charlotte Dundas , for towing on a canal, which was successfully operated.

Robert Fulton, an American artist, and subsequently a civil engineer, built a steamboat on the Seine in 1803, assisted by R. Livingston, then American Minister to France. Then in 1806 Fulton, having returned to the United States, commenced to build another steamboat, in which he was again assisted by Livingston, and in which he placed machinery made by Boulton and Watt in England. This steamboat, named the Clermont , was 130 ft. long, 18 ft. beam, 7 ft. depth and 160 tons burden. It made its first trip on the Hudson, from New York to Albany and return, in August, 1807, and subsequently made regular trips. It was the first commercially successful steamboat ever made, as George Stephenson's was the first commercially successful locomotive. In the meantime Col. John Stevens of New Jersey was also at work on a steamboat, and had in 1804 built such a boat at his shops, having a screw propeller and a flue boiler. Almost simultaneously with Fulton he brought out the Phœnix , a side-wheel steamer having hollow water lines and provided with feathering paddle wheels, and as Fulton and Livingston had a monopoly of the Hudson, Stevens took his boat by sea from New York around to Delaware bay and up the Delaware river. This was in 1808, and was the first sea voyage ever made by a steam vessel.

Transatlantic steamship navigation was started in 1819. A Mr. Scarborough of Savannah, Ga., in 1818 purchased a ship of about three hundred and fifty tons burden, which was named the Savannah . Equipped with engine and machinery it steamed out of New York Harbour on the 27th day of March, 1819, and successfully reached Savannah, Georgia. On the 20th of May in the same year she left Savannah for Liverpool, making the trip in 22 days. From Liverpool she went to Copenhagen, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Cronstadt and Arundel, and from the latter port returned to Savannah, making the passage in twenty-five days.

But Scottish waters, and the waters around other coasts of the British Islands, had been traversed by steamboats before this celebrated trip of the Savannah . Bell's steamboat between Glasgow and Greenock in 1812 was followed by five others in 1814; and seven steamboats plied on the Thames in 1817.

So the locomotives and the steamboats and steamships continued to multiply, and when the first forty years of the century had been reached the Iron Horse was fairly installed on the fields of Europe and America, and the rivers and the oceans were ploughed by its sisters, the steam vessels.

It was in 1840 that the famous Cunard line of transatlantic steamers was established, soon followed by the Collins line and others.

A few years before, John C. Stevens in America and John Ericsson in England had brought forward the screw propeller; and Ericsson was the first to couple the engine to the propeller shaft. It succeeded the successful paddle wheels of Fulton in America and Bell in England.

The nineteenth century is the age of kinetic energy: the energy of either solid, liquid, gaseous or electrical matter transformed into useful work.

It has been stated by that eminent specialist in steam engineering, Prof. R. H. Thurston, that "the steam engine is a machine which is especially designed to transform energy originally dormant or potential into active and useful available kinetic energy;" and that the great problem in this branch of science is "to construct a machine which shall in the most perfect manner possible convert the kinetic energy of heat into mechanical power, the heat being derived from the combustion of fuel, and steam being the receiver and conveyor of that heat."

Watt and his contemporaries regarded heat as a material substance called "Phlogiston." The modern kinetic theory of heat was a subsequent discovery, as elsewhere explained.