All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

ii6 All About Inventions through their respective drivers being deprived of the ways and means of pulling them up sharply when danger threatened. Now, if they had been equipped with a system of brakes, capable of acting upon every wheel in each train, the accident might have been avoided. This was the trend of thought which haunted the young traveller. The longer he pondered over the idea the more firmly convinced did he become that such an arrangement might be perfected. The young man was an engineer, and, indeed, had been attached for some months to the engineer corps of the Navy during the Civil War. His father was a successful manufacturer of agricultural machinery, and his works at Schenectady were well known and excellently equipped. The son had in- herited the paternal taste for mechanics, and during his boyhood had been encouraged to spend his spare time among the machine tools and in the drawing office attached to his father’s shops. After leaving the Services he had entered the Union College through the examinations at which he had passed with flying colours. He was also conversant somewhat with railway problems. In the previous year he had intro- duced a device for expeditiously replacing derailed railway vehicles upon the metals, and at that moment was occupied with another device to facilitate a certain phase of railway working. But now the brake idea became his obsession, and he resolved, before he reached home that afternoon, to work out a system which would conduce to greater safety in railway travel. He was familiar with the braking systems which then obtained, and