built by the Vulcan Foundry [Tayleur & Company, Warrington, 

 England] in 1835 for the South Carolina Railroad.) 



While the Niles brothers brooded over their ever-fluctuating 

 fortunes, some of the most unusual and mechanically advanced 

 locomotives built in the Midwest were under construction in their 

 extensive factory. The genius of this work was John La Fayette 

 Whetstone (i 821-1902), a son of the well-known Cincinnati pioneer 

 of the same name. His early life strangely parallels that of his later 

 business associate George E. Sellers (see p. 47). He had a marked 

 inclination toward the fine arts and as a young man was known 

 to be a sculptor and artist of some ability. The elder Whetstone 

 guided his son toward mechanics as a more suitable career, and 

 Whetstone adopted it with enthusiasm. 



The earliest demonstration of Whetstone's mechanical imagination 

 was his development of the radial valve gear used on Sellers' grade- 

 climbing locomotives built for the Panama Railroad in 1851 and 

 1852. The use of radial valve gears, which impart a constant lead 

 to the valve by means of the crossheads motion, results in a more 

 precise and economical distribution of steam to the cylinders. 

 Although valve gears of this type were widely used in Europe from 

 the late 1840's on, they received scant attention in this country 

 until 1904, when the motion was reintroduced in this country by 

 the spectacular performance of the mallet number 2400 of the 

 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. '^s As early as 1838 Seth Boyden 

 built a locomotive using a form of radial valve gear, but, unfor- 

 tunately, little data is available on it. 



Practically no mention of Whetstone's introduction of radial 

 valve gear is to be found other than a few notes in Sinclair's book 

 and in the Journal of the Fraitklin Institute. While Sinclair cites 

 Whetstone's motion as the earliest American form of this device, he 

 incorrectly states that it was used on engines built by Niles in the 

 early 1840's — at least ten years before Niles was in the locomotive 



153 William Mason used a radial motion of the Walschaert pattern on his patented 

 double truck locomotives as early as 1 874-1 875. Herbert Fisher, in Railway and 

 Locomotive Engineering (July 1909, vol. 22, p. 302), speculated that Mason may have 

 been inspired to experiment with radial motions after seeing the Defiance and the 

 Champion in operation on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Built by Niles & Company, 

 these engines were equipped with Whetstone's valve gear (see Chapter 3, 

 pp. 84-88). 



100 



