Anticipations | Page 2

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 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 and sustained by the
Royal Society; but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new
habits of mind that spread outward from that centre 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 engine was running along its rails and Evan's boat
was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot 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, that 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" 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, 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 Alleghanies 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 labourers might be obliged to