To such enormous dimensions has the railway developed. And the locomotive engine is the centre and soul of it all. Stephenson got it, so to speak, on its right lines of working, and it has run along them ever since, until in its great capacity for speed, its power for drawing heavy loads, and its strength and beauty of construction it may fairly be called one of the wonders of the world.
The Story of the Steamship.
CHAPTER I.
THE “COMET” APPEARS.
“If only people could reach the place easier, I could do more business.”
So mused Henry Bell of Glasgow about the year 1810. He was an ingenious and enterprising man, and he had established a hotel or bathing-house at Helensburgh on the Clyde. But he wanted more visitors, and he puzzled his brain to discover how he could offer facilities for them to reach the place.
He tried boats, worked by paddles, propelled by hand; but these proved a failure. They had been in use years before, though perhaps he knew it not. Tradition says that boats fitted with paddle wheels and worked by oxen in the boat, were known to the Egyptians, but perhaps tradition is wrong. The Romans and the Chinese also are said to have known wheel boats, the wheels worked by men or by animals—in the case of the Chinese apparently by men alone. A similar kind of boat appears to have been tried on the Thames in the seventeenth century; but whether Bell knew of these things or not, his experiments of the same kind did not answer. What was to be done?