INFLUENCE OF INVENTIONS ON CIVILIZATION. 663 



Some time before his death, in 1819, while resting from labor in 

 his old age, James Watt, when asked to allow his fellow-citizens to 

 honor him with a seat in Parliament, refused, saying that he had given 

 employment to the better part of a million of men, and had earned the 

 right to rest from work. To how many millions of men since then has 

 his invention given employment ! In a life of Watt published many 

 j^ears since I find a statement that the steam-power of the world was 

 equal to that of 400,000,000 men, and this amount has probably been 

 doubled since the statement was made. And yet the world has even 

 now but just begun to reap the fruits of this invention. Each year 

 witnesses the extension of its use. 



About seventy years ago Robert Fulton, one of the greatest me- 

 chanical geniuses of this country, applied the steam-engine to a boat 

 and made the first trial of a ship moved by the power of heat in a trip 

 from New York to Albany. Now every ocean is plowed by the 

 steamship, and there is hardly a navigable river on the face of the 

 globe that has not become a highway for it. A few years later, in 

 1825, George Stephenson invented the locomotive and gave to man the 

 railroad, and now, sixty years later, we have more than 128,000 miles 

 of railroad m operation in this country alone. 



I believe that no other Englishman has done so much for his fel- 

 low-men, so much to change the social and economical conditions of 

 society, as George Stephenson. 



Would you like to know how much the steam-engine has increased 

 the power of man in Massachusetts ? I can tell you what the locomo- 

 tive has done. In 1878 the railroad companies of this State had 1,030 

 locomotives. The proportion due to the amount of their track in this 

 State was 757, and the work they did was equal to what 913,545 

 horses could do on good common roads, and was equivalent to the 

 labor of 5,481,270 laboring-men, or to that of a population of nearly 

 20,000,000. 



Now, in 1875, Massachusetts had only about 130,000 horses, and 

 her population Avas a little more than a million and a half. 



But this was not all that Massachusetts owed to the steam-engine. 

 She employs it largely in steam-vessels owned in the State or coming 

 from abroad. What the whole amount of work done by these vessels 

 was equal to I do not know, but it was large. 



She also employed steam- and water-power in her manufactures 

 equal to that of 1,912,488 men. The work done by the steam- and 

 water-power was equal to what could have been done by hand-power 

 by a population of 7,400,000. 



I think there are more than 20,000 locomotives in the United 

 States. There would be more than that if all the roads were as well 

 provided with locomotives as the roads in Massachusetts are. 



Assuming that to be the number, and that they do as much work 

 as they do here, and the work is equal to that of 25,000,000 horses, 



