But a brilliant triumph succeeded. Eventually Watt became partner with Mr. Matthew Boulton, and the firm of Boulton & Watt manufactured the engine at Soho Ironworks, Birmingham. Mining proprietors soon discovered the value of the new machine, and Newcomen’s engine was superseded for pumping.
Watt continued to improve the machine, and together with Boulton also greatly improved the workmanship of constructing engines and machinery. In a patent taken out in 1784, he “described a steam locomotive”; but for some reason he did not prosecute the idea. It is possible that the notion of building a special road for it to run upon did not occur to him, or appear very practicable.
His work was done, and it was a great work; but it was left for others to develop the steam engine into forms for hauling carriages on land or propelling ships upon the sea. Trevithick, Stephenson, and others did the one; Symington, Bell, and others did the second. Watt died in 1819, and though so delicate in youth, he lived to his eighty-fourth year.
The steam engine, therefore, as Watt left it, was practically as Stephenson came to know it. He would be acquainted with it chiefly as a pumping machine. But he saw what others had done to adopt it as a locomotive, and he now set to work.
Stephenson’s first engine did not differ very materially from some of those which had preceded it. He was, so to speak, feeling his way. The machine had a round, wrought-iron boiler, eight feet long, with two upright cylinders placed on the top of it. At the end of the pistons from the cylinders were cross-rods connected with cogged wheels below by other rods. These cogged wheels gave motion to the wheels running on the rails by cogs not very far from the axles. Stephenson abandoned the cogged rail, and adopted smooth wheels and smooth rails; but he did not connect the driving-wheel direct with the piston, the intervening cogged wheels being thought necessary to unite the power of the two cylinders.
In adopting the principle of smooth wheels on smooth rails, it is said that Stephenson proved by experiment that the arrangement would work satisfactorily. Mr. Smiles writes that Robert Stephenson informed him, “That his father caused a number of workmen to mount upon the wheels of a waggon moderately loaded, and throw their entire weight upon the spokes on one side, when he found that the waggon could thus be easily propelled forward without the wheels slipping. This, together with other experiments, satisfied him of the expediency of adopting smooth wheels on his engine, and it was so finished accordingly.” Thus it may be said that this obstacle—imaginary though it largely proved to be—was cleared away from Stephenson’s first engine.
Ten months were occupied in building the machine, and at last came the day of its trial. This was the 25th of July, 1814. Would it work?
Jolting and jerking along, it did work, hauling eight carriages at a speed of about four or six miles an hour—as fast as a brisk man could walk. Then came the question—Would it prove more economical than horse-power?
Calculations therefore were made, and after a time it was found that “Blucher” as the engine was called, though we believe its real name was “My Lord,” was about as expensive as horse-power.