To tell in detail of the locomotive in one chapter is short allowance to a subject that fairly demands for itself a whole book, a technical mind for the telling, and at least a fairly technical mind for the understanding; a subject that in its history goes hand in hand with that of the railroad itself. Yet the limitations of this book forbid a more lengthy description.
We have already told of a very few of the earliest and most famous American locomotives; the Stourbridge Lion, which Horatio Allen brought to the Delaware & Hudson Company; the Best Friend, which was built in New York City, and which went to Charleston, South Carolina, to be the first American locomotive to run in the United States, the De Witt Clinton, which awoke the echoes of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in a single day; and the Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, which induced the directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to change their motive power from horses to steam, and so opened a great new development for their property.
A little while after Cooper’s Tom Thumb had achieved the astounding feat of beating a team of horses in hauling a railroad coach, the directors of the B. & O. offered a prize of $4,000 “for the most approved engine that shall be delivered for trial upon the road on or before June 1, 1831; and $3,500 for the engine which shall be adjudged the next best.” It was determined in this prospectus that “the engine, when in operation must not exceed three and one-half tons weight and must, on a level road, be capable of drawing day by day fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of wagons, fifteen miles an hour.”
Three locomotives answered this generous offer. Of them but one, the York, oftener called the Arabian, built at York, Pa., by Davis & Gartner, and hauled to Baltimore by horses over the turnpikes, was of practical service. Phineas Davis was a watch and clock maker, but he succeeded in devising a locomotive that was the forerunner of the famous Grasshopper upon the Baltimore & Ohio. Better name was never given to a locomotive, the rude and ungainly angles formed by rods and levers giving a distinct resemblance to the long-legged bugs. Yet the Grasshoppers served their purpose. In the late eighties, the Arabian was still in service in the Mount Clare yards at Baltimore. With a single exception, it never had an accident or even left the rails. That exception was just before the completion of the Washington branch, and Davis was a passenger upon the engine. It was going at a fair rate of speed when suddenly it rolled over upon its side in the ditch. No one was hurt, save Davis, who was instantly killed. It seemed a strange caprice of Fate, for although careful examination was immediately made, both of the engine and of the track, no reason could ever be assigned for the accident.
In that same year, 1831, the John Bull, which was built by George & Robert Stephenson & Company, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England, was received in Philadelphia for the Camden & Amboy Railroad. As long as the locomotive continues to serve the railroad the name of George Stephenson, its inventor, must be indissolubly linked with it. The John Bull was easily the most famous Stephenson engine ever sent to the United States. It has been shown at all our great expositions, and now occupies a position of honor in the great Smithsonian institution at Washington. Of these early engines, which it was found necessary to bring from England, a volume once issued by the Rogers Locomotive Works, of Paterson, N. J., has said:
“These locomotives ... furnished the types and patterns from which those which were afterwards built here were fashioned. But American designs soon began to depart from their British prototypes, and a process of adaption to the existing conditions of the railroads in this country followed, which afterwards differentiated the American locomotives more and more from those built in Great Britain. A marked feature of difference between American and English locomotives has been the use of a forward truck under the former.”
As a matter of fact, the English engines, built for use on long straight stretches of line would never have served on the early roads in this country with their steep and curving routes through the mountains. So, in the latter part of the year 1831, John B. Jervis invented what he called “a new plan of frame, with a bearing-carriage for a locomotive engine” for the use of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, in which he introduced the forward truck which is to-day a distinctive feature of American engines. Its effectiveness was at once recognized, and its almost general adoption immediately followed. Five years later, Henry R. Campbell, of Philadelphia, had patented his system of two driving-wheels and a truck, and the distinctive type of American locomotive was born.
In the development of that peculiarly successful type, great names have been written into the history of American locomotive-building—the names of such men as Rogers and Winans and Hinckley and Mason and Brooks and Matthias Baldwin and William Norris; the last two both of Philadelphia. Norris, after some interesting smaller engines, built the George Washington in 1835. This engine was not one whit less than a triumph. It ascended the steep plane of the Columbia Railroad in Philadelphia, a grade of 7½ per cent, carrying two passenger cars in which were seated 53 persons. It came to a stop on that grade and started up again by its own efforts. After reaching the summit, the engine was turned around and came down, stopping once in its descent.
That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane, and the performance of the George Washington has not been attempted in all these years save in the case of Latrobe’s temporary line at Kingwood Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment, pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170 others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony. William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for the growing nation across the Atlantic.
Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the beginning of his life. He lived long enough to lay the foundation of one of the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm that has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and kept it alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin’s first locomotive was built in 1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad; and that it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed twenty years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built two years later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg Company. After that his works were regularly established, their head to give his patience and untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive. The history of Baldwin locomotives is, in an important sense, the history of the industry in the United States.