LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY[96]
By H. G. WELLS
(1866—). A leading novelist, essayist and historian. Through his energy and high ability he won his way to a place in the educational world, and ultimately to a commanding position in the literary world. He writes with unusual vigor and originality. Some of his most stimulating books are The Time Machine; The War of the Worlds; When the Sleeper Wakes; Anticipations; Tono Bungay; The Future of America; Social Forces in England and America; The History of the World.
Some essays go beyond the world of little things and set forward their writers' meditations on matters of great import. Such essays look back across the whole field of history or look forward into the remoteness of the future. In essays of this kind Mr. H. G. Wells has done much to stimulate thought.
In the selection that follows Mr. Wells traces the development of locomotion from the days of wagons to the days of steam. At the close of the selection Mr. Wells suggests to the reader that the advance to be made in the future may be as great as that which has been made in the past.
The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very interesting phase in that great development of means of land transit that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam-engine running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind.
A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the history of the world?
Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the development strikes one—as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin[97] strikes one—as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the need for the railway and steam-engine had only just arisen, and—to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man—the demand created the supply; it was quite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for such things at the time; the current needs of the European world seem to have been fairly well served by coach and diligence in 1800, and, on the other hand, every administrator of intelligence in the Roman and Chinese empires must have felt an urgent need for more rapid methods of transit than those at his disposal. Nor was the development of the steam locomotive the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and something of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known for two thousand years; it had been used for pumping water, opening doors, and working toys before the Christian era. It may be urged that this advance was the outcome of that new and more systematic handling of knowledge initiated by Lord Bacon[98] and sustained by the Royal Society;[99] but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of mind that spread outward from that center played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's[100] engine was running along its rails and Evans'[101] boat was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot[102] expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our attribution of the steam-engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does this particular invention seem to have been directly due to the new possibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by the substitution of coal for wood in iron works, through the greater temperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in the reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities did greatly help the steam-engine in its invasion of the field of common life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series of causes, set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and in another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive factor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to have supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for two thousand years in the group of conditions that were necessary before the steam locomotive could appear.
This missing ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple, profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam utilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's “Rocket”[103] in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence de novo,[104] however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in low, hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the Alleghenies, for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quite unprecedented pumping appliances became necessary, and the thoughts of practical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the laborers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates in England—rather as a toy than in earnest—before the middle of the seventeenth century, and the attempt to employ it was so obvious as to be practically unavoidable.[105] The water trickling into the coal measures[106] acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals that have long been mixed together, dry and inert. Immediately the latent reactions were set going. Savery,[11] Newcome,[107] a host of other workers culminating in Watt,[108] working always by steps that were at least so nearly obvious as to give rise again and again to simultaneous discoveries, changed this toy of steam into a real, a commercial thing, developed a trade in pumping-engines, created foundries and a new art of engineering, and, almost unconscious of what they were doing, made the steam locomotive a well-nigh unavoidable consequence. At last, after a century of improvement on pumping-engines, there remained nothing but the very obvious stage of getting the engine that had been developed on wheels and out upon the ways of the world.
Ever and ever again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the roads and pronounced a failure—one monstrous Palæoferric creature[109] was visible on a French high-road as early as 1769—but by the dawn of the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By 1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and almost financially possible, and from his hands it puffed its way, slowly at first, and then, under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive—but for all that it was primarily a steam-engine for pumping adapted to a new end; it was a steam-engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions that were by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that fact followed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy for the high-road—it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked are steam-engines and railways in our minds, that, in common language now, the latter implies the former. But, indeed, it is the result of accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties, that we travel to-day on rails.