All About Engines

CHAPTER X The Locomotive IF the steam engine had only been employed to supply power for mines and factories the progress which has been recorded would never have been made. Goods have not merely to be made ; they have also to be sold. Raw materials must be brought from the far distant places where they occur, to the centres where they are wrought and fashioned and changed as by a magician’s wand into things of use and beauty. And if these things of use and beauty could be distributed only in the pedlar’s pack, on the back of a horse, in a wheeled vehicle drawn by some quadruped, by the slow barge or the uncertain sailing ship, the demand for the factory product would be small indeed. To people remote from the centres of manufacture they would be rare and costly luxuries, like many of the wares displayed at fairs in the Middle Ages. But the railway and the steam- ship, by facilitating their distribution, have made these things plentiful and cheap, so that even the poorest may share in the products of the world’s genius. But quite apart from the encouragement of trade and commerce, there is another aspect in which steam locomotion on railways has revolutionised 251