There were, however, at a much earlier period, several wealthy and enterprising men, both in Yorkshire and Northumberland, who were willing to give the locomotive a fair trial; and had Trevithick but possessed the requisite tenacity of purpose—had he not been too soon discouraged by partially successful experiments—he might have risen to both fame and fortune, not only as the inventor of the locomotive, but as the practical introducer of railway locomotion.
One of Trevithick's early friends and admirers was Mr. Blackett, of Wylam. The Wylam wagon-way is one of the oldest in the north of England. Down to the year 1807 it was formed of wooden spars or rails, laid down between the colliery at Wylam—where old Robert Stephenson worked—and the village of Lemington, some four miles down the Tyne, where the coals were loaded into keels or barges, and floated down past Newcastle, to be shipped for London. Each chaldron-wagon had a man in charge of it, and was originally drawn by one horse. The rate at which the wagons were hauled was so slow that only two journeys were performed by each man and horse in one day, and three on the day following. This primitive wagon-way passed, as before stated, close in front of the cottage in which George Stephenson was born, and one of the earliest sights which met his infant eyes was this wooden tram-road worked by horses.
Mr. Blackett was the first colliery owner in the North who took an active interest in the locomotive. He had witnessed the first performances of Trevithick's steam-carriage in London, and was so taken with the idea of its application to railway locomotion that he resolved to have an engine erected after the new patent for use upon his tram-way at Wylam. He accordingly obtained from Trevithick, in October, 1804, a plan of his engine, provided with "friction-wheels," and employed Mr. John Whinfield, of Pipewellgate, Gateshead, to construct it at his foundery there. The engine was made under the superintendence of one John Steele,[32] an ingenious mechanic, who had been in Wales, and worked under Trevithick in fitting the engine at Pen-y-darran. When the Gateshead locomotive was finished, a temporary way was laid down in the works, on which it was run backward and forward many times. For some reason or other, however—it is said because the engine was too light for drawing the coal-trains—it never left the works, but was dismounted from the wheels, and set to blow the cupola of the foundery, in which service it long continued to be employed.
Several years elapsed before Mr. Blackett took any farther steps to carry out his idea. The final abandonment of Trevithick's locomotive at Pen-y-darran perhaps contributed to deter him from proceeding farther; but he had the Wylam wooden tram-way taken up in 1808, and a plate-way of cast iron laid down instead—a single line furnished with sidings to enable the laden wagons to pass the empty ones. The new iron road proved so much smoother than the old wooden one, that a single horse, instead of drawing one, was enabled to draw two, or even three laden wagons.
BLENKINSOP'S LEEDS ENGINE.
Although the locomotive seemed about to be lost sight of, it was not forgotten. In 1811, Mr. Blenkinsop, the manager of the Middleton Collieries, near Leeds, revived the idea of employing it in lieu of horses to haul the coals along his tram-way. Mr. Blenkinsop, in the patent which he took out for his proposed engine, followed in many respects the design of Trevithick; but, with the help of Matthew Murray, of Leeds, one of the most ingenious mechanics of his day, he introduced several important and valuable modifications. Thus he employed two cylinders of 8 in. diameter instead of one, as in Trevithick's engine. These cylinders were placed vertically, and immersed for more than half their length in the steam space of the boiler. The eduction pipes met in a single tube at the top, and threw the steam into the air. The boiler was cylindrical in form, but of cast iron. It had one flue, the fire being at one end and the chimney at the other. The engine was supported on a carriage without springs, resting directly upon two pairs of wheels and axles unconnected with the working parts, and which merely served to carry the engine upon the rails. The motion was effected in this way: the piston-rods, by means of cross-heads, worked the connecting-rods, which came down to two cranks on each side below the boiler, placed at right angles in order to pass their centres with certainty. These cranks worked two shafts fixed across the engine, on which were small-toothed wheels working into a larger one between them; and on the axis of this large wheel, outside the framing, were the driving-wheels, one of which was toothed, and worked into a rack on one side of the railway.
It will be observed that the principal new features in this engine were the two cylinders and the toothed-wheel working into a rack-rail. Mr. Blenkinsop contrived the latter expedient in order to insure sufficient adhesion between the wheel and the road, supposing that smooth wheels and smooth rails would be insufficient for the purpose. Clumsy and slow though the engine was compared with modern locomotives, it was nevertheless a success. It was the first engine that plied regularly upon any railway, doing useful work; and it continued so employed for more than twenty years. What was more, it was a commercial success, for its employment was found to be economical compared with horse-power. In a letter to Sir John Sinclair, Mr. Blenkinsop stated that his engine weighed five tons; consumed two thirds of a hundred weight of coals and fifty gallons of water per hour; drew twenty-seven wagons, weighing ninety-four tons, on a dead level, at three and a half miles an hour, or fifteen tons up an ascent of 2 in. in the yard; that when "lightly loaded" it traveled at a speed of ten miles an hour; that it did the work of sixteen horses in twelve hours; and that its cost was £400. Such was Mr. Blenkinsop's own account of the performances of his engine, which was for a long time regarded as one of the wonders of the neighborhood.[33] The Messrs. Chapman, of Newcastle, in 1812 endeavored to overcome the same fictitious difficulty of the want of adhesion between the wheel and the rail by patenting a locomotive to work along the road by means of a chain stretched from one end of it to the other. This chain was passed once round a grooved barrel-wheel under the centre of the engine, so that when the wheel turned, the locomotive, as it were, dragged itself along the railway. An engine constructed after this plan was tried on the Heaton Railway, near Newcastle; but it was so clumsy in action, there was so great a loss of power by friction, and it was found to be so expensive and difficult to keep in repair, that it was very soon abandoned. Another remarkable expedient was adopted by Mr. Brunton, of the Butterley Works, Derbyshire, who in 1813 patented his Mechanical Traveler, to go upon legs working alternately like those of a horse.[34] But this engine never got beyond the experimental state, for, at its very first trial, the driver, to make sure of a good start, overloaded the safety-valve, when the boiler burst and killed a number of the by-standers, wounding many more. These, and other contrivances with the same object, projected about the same time, show that invention was busily at work, and that many minds were anxiously laboring to solve the problem of steam locomotion on railways.
Mr. Blackett, of Wylam, was encouraged by the success of Mr. Blenkinsop's experiment, and again he resolved to make a trial of the locomotive upon his wagon-way. Accordingly, in 1812, he ordered a second engine, which was so designed as to work with a toothed driving-wheel upon a rack-rail as at Leeds. This locomotive was constructed by Thomas Waters, of Gateshead, under the superintendence of Jonathan Foster, Mr. Blackett's principal engine-wright. It was a combination of Trevithick's and Blenkinsop's engines; but it was of a more awkward construction than either. Like Trevithick's, it had a single cylinder with a fly-wheel, which Blenkinsop had discarded. The boiler was of cast iron. Jonathan Foster described it to the author in 1854 as "a strange machine, with lots of pumps, cog-wheels, and plugs, requiring constant attention while at work." The weight of the whole was about six tons.