Anticipations | Page 3

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.[3] The water trickling into the coal
measures[4] acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals that have long been
mixed together dry and inert. Immediately the latent reactions were set going. Savery,
Newcomen, a host of other workers, culminating in Watt, 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 again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the roads and
pronounced a failure--one monstrous Palæoferric creature 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.
Railway travelling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal of locomotive
convenience, so far as travellers are concerned, is surely a highly mobile conveyance
capable of travelling easily and swiftly to any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably
controlled pace, the ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of
speed and long-distance travelling to specialized ways restricted to swift traffic, and
possibly furnished with guide-rails. For the collection and delivery of all sorts of
perishable goods also the same system is obviously altogether superior to the existing
methods. Moreover, such a system would admit of that secular progress in engines and
vehicles that the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely arrested,
because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at once upon the ways without
interference with the established traffic. Had such an ideal been kept in view from the
first the traveller would now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of
from seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the trouble,
waiting, expense, and delay that arises between the household or hotel and the actual rail.
It was an ideal that must have been at least possible to an intelligent person fifty years
ago, and, had it been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise
to compromise as it always has done and as it will do very probably for many centuries
yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with an infinitely more practicable
method of communication, but with one capable of a steady and continual evolution from
year to year.
But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately cheaper, and
along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth Century Progress, quite heedless of the
possibility of ending in a cul-de-sac. The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition
of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy,
and their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and
smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways that
were already in existence--chiefly for the transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And

from that followed a very interesting and curious result.
These tram-lines very naturally