Early in the morning advertised for free messages, an honest patron of science living on the line a short distance out of town went up one of the poles and hung a letter on the wire, and secreted himself in view of the missive and in vain watched it all day, that he might obtain the secret of the process.
Another individual of inquiring mind on his way to the city boasted he intended to know before he returned how the thing was done. On his way home he was accosted by a neighbor who wished to know how it was possible to send a message to Columbus with safety on one of those little wires. The Squire said to himself it was no longer a mystery—he was a justice of the peace, and above the average as a lawyer—saying: “You see, they have a machine that rolls and compresses a letter into a little bit of an oblong roll, which just fits into a little brass cylinder, and when ready to send it is pushed up to a kind of machine all full of cog-wheels and ticking clock-work, and the man at the head says, ‘All ready—go’—and he touches a button, and the electricity runs out on the wire, and strikes the head of the cylinder in which the letter is placed, and it goes, chebang, to the other end of the wire, and drops into a basket.”
All this was worked out by the mental process of the Squire, who actually believed he had solved the process of telegraphing, as much as the engineers did that of railroading when they constructed the track of solid masonry.
In 1837, the horse-car running from Toledo to Adrian, Michigan, on oak rails was remodeled, road-bed improved in grades, rails strapped, an engine to take the place of horses, “and a beautiful new passenger coach to supply that of the old coach bodies.” It was also advertised the road would be “running regularly on and after October 1, 1837,” and that the “speed would be greatly increased, and would be able to carry passengers and the United States mail at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, making the entire distance, thirty miles, in two hours.”
New Passenger Car on the Toledo & Adrian Ry. 1837.
A fair likeness of the new passenger coach is [here given], which, in days of primitive railroading, was looked upon as a step in the right direction. But this road was soon obliged to again suspend operations, temporarily, for other changes—many discouragements stood in the pathway to prosperity. Strap-iron rails on parallel timbers and stonemasonry and solidity proved failures, and the locomotive added no advantage over the horse, as existing conditions would not tolerate great velocity, the very thing in chief that would insure supremacy over a canal.
And England was twenty years in search of an adjustment of road and machinery by which velocity could be increased without an increase of danger. But the discouragements were so numerous, many hopeful workers abandoned the field. Only six years previous to George Stephenson’s locomotive, “Rocket,” making twenty-nine and a half miles in an hour, a book was published on “Railways,” in which the author says: “That nothing could do more harm toward the adoption of railways than the promulgation of such nonsense, as that we shall see locomotive engines traveling at the rate of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, and twenty miles an hour.”[28]
This may have been intended for Americans as well as Mr. Stephenson, for the “promulgation of such nonsense” did not cease, and power and speed increased with the increase in size of the parts of the machinery insured. So rapidly was this increase, that strong attempts were made from time to time to fix a legal limit at some point below twenty miles—in England.
In the United States, however, the faster the better, and from five rose to fifty, and then began looking around for rails and road-bed that would withstand the racket.