All About Engines

The Locomotive 253 Watt’s invention. But the first practical steam carriage was constructed by W. J. Cugnot, a French- man, in 1769, for the purpose of transporting artil- lery. (Fig. 141, Plate 25.) The cylinders of this engine were 13 inches in diameter, and the wheels were turned by a ratchet and pawl. Watt himself had ideas on the subject, and with the aid of Murdoch he made a model in 1784. But the demand for engines for driving mills and factories was so great that he had no time to devote to the subject. Indeed, he appears to have lost interest in it. It was Richard Trevithick, a Cornishman, who made the most persistent efforts and came nearest to success. In 1804 he built a locomotive to run on the Penydarren tramway in South Wales, and four years later he constructed a circular railway in London and ran an engine upon it at 12 to 15 miles an hour. For the first time it became generally understood that an engine would draw a load on smooth rails, and that so long as the line was fairly level, no toothed wheels and rack were re- quired. Trevithick in England and Evans in America were the first men to use high-pressure steam. And Trevithick is really the inventor of the locomotive. The real father of the railway, however, was George Stephenson, who, like nearly all the inventors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, started life without any advantages of education or worldly wealth. Born on June 9th, 1781, at Wylam, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, where his father was engine-