The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-21 00:00:00

smooth rail and wheel for traction was, indeed, the

great principle the establishment of which rescued the

Locomotive from oblivion. The only means by which

heavy loads could be drawn by locomotive power be-
fore Headley's time was by the employment of the

toothed wheel and the racked rail, as employed by
Blenkinsop and Trevethick, but the " pull" tore up
the racked rail, and consequently this system had to
be abandoned for horses. It was in the year 1812,
when the price of corn and all kinds of horse pro-
vender was so dear, that the necessity of substitut-
ing mechanical power for living muscle again thrust
itself upon the attention of the Wylam viewer.

Unless some saving could be made'in the working

of the colliery the works must be closed, and himself
and family thrown out of bread. Thus stimulated
to exertion, he brought out his plan of weighting
the engine and of coupling the wheels so as to pre-

vent any of them slipping. He proved this could be
done experimentally by constructing a waggon,
weighting it with iron, and then propelling it by the
power of several men seated upon it and working
winches. The carriage thus weighted drew several
loaded waggons well enough. In order to prove

that it was the weight which caused the wheels to
bite, in place of the iron load, he substituted a num-
ber of men who, at a given signal, left off working

at the winches and jumped to the ground, when the
wheels immediately began to slip round. The model

of this experimental waggon, with the connected
wheels, which thus solved the problem of making

the smooth wheel adhere to the smooth rail, or, to

use thelanguage of Stephenson, of making "man and
wife" of them, is in the Museum beside Puffing Billy,

and fully establishes the claim of William Headley
to the discovery of this all-important principle.
It does seem extraordinary that engineers should
have taken it for granted that the wheels must
necessarily slip up to the time of this experiment,

and that before Headley's time no experiments should
have been made. Surely, the weighting an engine

to produce sufficient friction for the purpose was a
very simple idea that ought to have occurred to our
engineers. We suspect, however, that even so late as

the year 1813 the knowledge of our practical en-
gineers was limited to rule of thumb work. The
Wylom engine is certainly an extraordinary looking
machine, as rude and rough-looking in appearance
as could well be conceived, and placed as it isbeside
the Rocket, the premier engine on the Liverpool and

Manchester Railway, it looks like a collier beside a
gentleman. But it must be remembered that between

he dates of construction of those two engines 14

years have elapsed, a period during which the locomo-
tive had grown from childhood to manhood, if we may
____

use such terms to inanimate objects.

The Rockel

which, in the most momentous race the world has
ever seen, wrested the £BOO prize from the Sans-
pareil and the Novelty was the production of a loco-
motive factory which Stephenson, with the aid of
Mr. Pease, had established four years before at
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Mr. Stephenson, when he
introduced the locomotive to public notice on the
opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway a
few years before, saw clearly enough that it was
not sufficient to establish sound principles of work-
ing, if the means of carrying them out were defi-
cient. Good engineering principles, like good laws,
require good machinery to give them effect, and
colliery millwrights and smiths were clearly not

up to the work of making locomotives the good
working of which depended upon the accuracy
with which their parts were fitted. The es-
tablishment of the locomotive factory did more,

perhaps, towards establishing Stephenson's fame
than anything else. If it could be said that without

Boulton there would have been no Watt, with still
greater truth might it be said that without Pease
there would have been no Stephenson. It was the
accurate workmanship of the Rocket, resulting
from the trained hands in the Newcastle Locomotive
Works, that stood Stephenson in such good stead
on the day of trial. Both the Sanspareil, which
by some was considered as good an engine
as its successful rival, and the Novelty broke
down in the course of the trial at Rainhill through
some small defect in workmanship, and in the eyes
of the whole world Stephenson's name henceforth
became mainly associated with the locomotive. The
Rocket presents very little difference in outward
appearance from the engines of the present day,
except in its small size. All the rods and working
machinery, which heretofore, even in the Darling-
ton engines, were carried high in the air over the
boiler, were now placed lower down on either side of
it near the centre of gravity, the cylinders being
placed at an angle of 45, and acting directly upon
the driving wheels, the spokes and fellies of which,
strangely enough, are of wood ! The Sanspareil,
built by the late Timothy, of Darlington, has only
just arrived in the Museum, having been presented
by his son, Mr. John Hackworth. This engine,
after its defeat in the great trial, was purchased by
the Leeds and Manchester Railway Company, and
was afterwards employed in the conveyance of pas-
sengers and general traffic on the Bolton and
Leigh Railway until the year 1844, when, being
found short of power for the rapidly increasing
traffic, it was removed to Mr. Hargreaves's colliery
at Cappul, near Chorley, where it was used as a
fixed engine in winding and pumping. This work it
did most satisfactorily until the end of the year 1863,
when it was removed in consequence solely of the pit
being exhausted. The engine is very similar in appear-
ance to Mr. Heaclley's old Wylam engine, but ithas
one great improvement—the coupling of thewheels,
instead of being accomplished by the cog-wheel
by a simple coupling-rod fixed upon the two wheels.
arrangement underneath the boiler, was produced
In the perpendicular position of the cylinders, high
up over the boiler, it resembled the Wylam engine,
but the pistons worked from their undersides, and
in fixed slides, being a grand improvement on the
complicated system of rods in that old engine. Pos-
sibly the Novelty, which was driven on the occasion
of the trial by the present Sir Charles Fox, may also
come here. The Commissioners then would only
want Stephenson's first Killingworth engine and
No. 1 Darlington engine, at present on a pedestal
at the Darlington Station, to possess the most inte-
resting group of locomotives in the world. There is
one feature in the old Wylam engine which is worthy
of notice. The fire-tube doubles upon itself, the
chimney coming out beside the furnace door. This
length of heating surface gave it an immense ad-
vantage over all previous colliery engines ; indeed,
neither Stephenson's Killingworth engines, nor those
that worked the Darlington line were so constructed,
and consequently were so far deficient in powers of
getting up steam. In the Rocket, however,
Stephenson, on the suggestion of the secretary of
the Liverpool and Manchester line, adopted the
tubular boiler, a plan of rapidly producing steam
long before known, but which was now in a happy
moment again employed with the best effect. It
seems to be expected that the visitor who stops to
inspect this interesting engine will be more struck
with the fact that it killed Mr. Huskisson, of which
he is informed by a written ticket attached, than
that it inaugurated the first great passenger railway
line, as if it were a more momentous feat to kill a
great statesman than to annihilate space and time.
Under a glass case is a small model of a loco-
motive intended for the common road, patented in
18'02 by Richard Trevethic and Andrew Vivian.
This is supposed 'to 'be the first model in existence
of a locomotive. But in the museum of the
Patent-office at Paris there is a model of a loco-
motive of long prior date, and in an adjoining
church, now appropriated as a kind of hospital for
old decayed engines,
is the original locomotive that
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actually ran upon the road, but in doing so killed a
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and not the man to the engine, as was
the case with
Mr. Huskisson.
Scarcely less interesting than these great carriers
of the cotton goods of Manchester is the group of
worm-eaten old spinning-machines invented in 1769
by Richard Arkwright, the introduction of which,
having caused such an enormous increase of the
cotton manufacture, may be said to have led to the
introduction of the improved locomotive upon the
Liverpool and Manchester line. The greater part
of these machines are made of wood, now so rotten
and decayed that they can scarcely hold together.
The first machine was made by a watchmaker
named King, of Warrington, and it is recorded that
he hesitated long before he undertook the employ-
ment, so doubtful was the appearance of the inven-