HISTORY

OF THE

RISE AND PROGRESS OF RAILWAYS.

IF a survey be taken of the various nations of the earth, it will doubtless be found, that the most prominent feature which distinguishes the regions of civilization from those of the savage, and indicates the march of improvement, is the general facility for communication. This characteristic of a country is a sure criterion by which to judge of its inhabitants; where rivers and lakes have been made navigable, harbours cleared, bordered by docks and quays, and indented by piers, and where the inland districts are intersected by high roads and canals, there we point to the abode of civilized man; and where huge towns are connected by railroads, by which a daily exchange of their mercantile multitudes takes place, by which as it were two huge rivers of living beings are flowing side by side in opposite directions, between the large towns and cities; in a land in which this is the case, we may safely say that its people are in the very front

of human progression; but where the harbours, lakes, and rivers are unimproved, and the country but vaguely marked by the lonely and scarcely traceable footpath, there is the region of desolation, the haunt of the wild beast and the savage.

The advance of human improvement bears an analogy to a geometrical progression. The darkness and ignorance of ancient ages preclude the possibility of an exact history of the early efforts at human advancement; but still we are enabled by philosophy to declare the causal conditions essential to the production of the effects which history speaks of. The first general knowledge that man attained must have related to the means of obtaining subsistence, then after long ages came the notion of communicating by signs or hieroglyphics, then after another lapse came the suggestion of the alphabet, and the communication of knowledge by manuscripts; this led in the course of time to the invention of printing, and this latter to the wider diffusion of knowledge, and the attraction of a greater number of individuals into the vortex of philosophy; after this the impatient bounding forwards of the human intellect becomes more striking; the more ancient the times, the longer the intervals between the different discoveries; the more modern, the shorter are these lapses. After the discovery of printing, the number of improvements thicken so fast upon us, and these, forming merely fresh starting places for the philosophers, lead to such a multitude of fresh advances, that we are almost bewildered in the wondrous contemplation, till attracted by that greatest of discoveries

-the one which most influences human action and happiness, the practical applicability of the expansibility of water into steam as a motive power.

Great discoveries in science may be ranked among the greatest class of natural events, so great is their modifying influence on human destiny. These discoveries generally spring from the most trifling circumstances, occurrences which must have been observed thousands of times by numerous generations; but, for these to suggest the notion of scientific discovery, a peculiar philosophic susceptibility is requisite. In the various modifications of knowledge, the multiplicity of thought that has been excited in the human brain that constitutes the intellectual sequence of effects, how often must the knowledge of the falling of things towards the centre of the earth, or the oscillatory motion of pendulous bodies, or the expansibility of water into steam, and the elastic force of the latter, have been in excitement in ordinary heads, and no discovery took place; but when a peculiar philosophic susceptibility becomes acted on by the same circumstances, the apple falling to the ground suggests the notion of gravity, and the explanation of the planetary motions; the swinging of a lamp suggests the notion of the use of the pendulum as a measure of time; and the change of water into the elastic fluid steam, suggests its utility as a motive power in machinery.

The earliest application of steam as a mechanical prime mover that we read of in history, is the instance of a machine by Hero, a philosopher of Alexandria,

who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, nearly 2000 years ago. This instrument was of a very simple character; it consisted of a spherical boiler, revolving on an axis, and this being partly filled with water, and a fire placed under it, the steam was allowed to escape in such a direction from a tube or tubes, as to make the sphere recoil in the opposite direction, and thus turn on its axis in a somewhat similar way to that in which the wheels in fire-works are made to revolve in an opposite direction to that in which the combustibles explode. This machine was a mere toy, not being applied by the ancients to any purpose of practical utility. In the 12th century heated water was applied at Rheims by a Professor of the Schools, called Gerbert, to the working of an organ and the production of sound. In 1543, an experiment was instituted at Barcelona by order of Charles V., on the suggestion of a naval officer, Blasco de Garay, when the latter propelled a vessel without sails or oars, by the agency of boiling water and some mechanical contrivance. About the year 1606, Baptista Porta, the inventor of the Camera Obscura, an Italian, describes a fountain in which water may be raised by the agency of steam. In 1615, Solomon de Caus, engineer to Louis XIII. of France, illustrates by a figure the process by which steam might be used to elevate water.

In 1629, Giovanni Branca, an Italian, published a plan by which steam might be used as a motive power. He proposed that a stream of steam should be poured fourth from the spout of a boiler, and that in this the vanes or sails of a wheel should be placed, so as to be

acted on by it in the same manner that a windmill is by a stream of air.

In 1663, the Marquis of Worcester published a book entitled "A Century of the Names and Scantlings of such Inventions as at present I can call to Mind to have Tried and Perfected." In this work the nobleman in his peculiar egotistical style, indicates his acquaintance with the nature of steam; he thus describes an experiment and also an engine constructed by him, "I have invented an admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire, not by drawing or sucking it upwards for that must be, as the philosopher calleth it, intra sphæram activitatis, which is but at such a distance. But this way hath no bounder, if the vessels be strong enough; for I have taken a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filled it three quarters full of water, stopping and screwing up the broken end, as also the touch-hole, and, making a constant fire under, within twenty-four hours it burst and made a great crack; so that, having a way to make my vessels, so that they are strengthened by the force within them, and the one to fill after the other, I have seen the water run like a constant fountain stream, forty feet high; one vessel of water, rarified by fire, driveth up forty of cold water. And a man that tends the work is but to turn two cocks, that, one vessel of water being consumed, another begins to force and refill with cold water, and so successively; the fire being tended and kept constant, which the self-same person may likewise abundantly perform in the interim between the necessity of turning the said