474 



NA TURE 



[September 29, 1923 



Transport and its Indebtedness to Science.' 

 By Sir Henry Fowler, K.B.E. 



J)ROBLEMS of transportation have been solved 

 more or less successfully in all ages, and some 

 of them, such as the moving of stones to Stonehenge, 

 etc., still excite our wonder and admiration. Such 

 works, and similar ones of much greater magnitude in 

 the East, could be accomplished by quite crude methods 

 if there was unlimited labour available, and if time 

 were of no consequence. The transportation which 

 aids civilisation is that which cuts down the wastage 

 of power to a minimum and reduces the time occupied 

 in carrying this out. It is here that science has helped 

 in times past, and will help increasingly in the future 

 if we are to go forward. In no other branch is Telford's 

 dictum that the science of engineering is " the art of 

 directing the great sources of power in Nature for the 

 use and convenience of man " so well exemplified, and 

 this utilisation has been carried forward at ever- 

 increasing speed during the last hundred years. If 

 we take the definition of science as " ordered knowledge 

 of natural phenomena and of the relations between 

 them," as given by W. C. D. Whetham in the " Encyclo- 

 paedia Britannica," we shall easily see how transporta- 

 tion has been dependent upon it. 



Transport is mainly dependent upon three things — 

 the method of propulsion, the material available for 

 use, and the path over which traction takes place. I 

 propose to confine my remarks to the first two. 

 Advance in traction really became rapid when methods 

 of propulsion other than those of animals and the 

 force of the wind became available. The greatest step 

 forward — wonderful as some of the achievements of 

 aeronautics have been of recent years — came with the 

 development of the steam engine. 



Like most great achievements in the world, it was 

 not a lucky and sudden discovery of one individual, 

 although here as elsewhere we associate the work with 

 the name of one man especially. This has usually 

 been the case, and without wishing to detract from the 

 work of the individuals who are fortunate enough to 

 utilise the ordered knowledge available to the practical 

 use of man, one must not forget the labours of those 

 who have sought out that knowledge and have given 

 it freely to the world, thus placing it at the disposal 

 of the one whose imagination and creative faculty were 

 great enough to see how it could be utilised in the 

 service of man. 



The first attempt at traction by using a steam engine 

 was a failure because of the lack of this knowledge. 

 I refer to the work of Jonathan Hulls and his attempt 

 in 1736-7 to apply a steam engine to the propulsion 

 of a boat on the River Avon in Worcestershire. He 

 failed because of the lack of that knowledge, although 

 undoubtedly he possessed the necessary imagination. 



Although James Watt is not directly associated 

 with traction, it was his application of science to 

 practical use that finally gave the greatest impulse to 

 transportation that it has ever had. No advance had 

 taken place after Newcomen's engine of 1720 until 

 Watt's work of 1769. His knowledge of Black's work 



' From the presidential address delivered to Section G (Engineering) of 

 the British Association at Liverpool on September 14. 



NO. 2813, VOL. 112] 



at Glasgow on the latent heat of steam, and his own 

 experiments with the Newcomen model, led to the 

 success of his improvements of the steam engine. His 

 scientific knowledge is clearly shown in his patents 

 and publications, for he dealt with steam jacketing in 

 1769, with expansive working in 1782, and he devised 

 his parallel motion in 1784. His direct connexioii 

 with transport includes the reference to a steam 

 carriage and a screw propeller in 1784, while the firm 

 of Boulton and Watt corresponded with Foulton for 

 a period extending from 1794 to 1805. 



Although Cugnot in 1770 and Murdoch in 1786 had 

 made models of vehicles propelled by steam, it was 

 Richard Trevithick with his steam carriage in 1801 

 and 1803 and ill-fated railway in 1804 who first showed 

 the practical application which could l)e made. It is 

 probable that the engine which his assistant, Steel, 

 took to the wagon-way at Wylam in 1805 turned the 

 thoughts of George Stephenson to the work that has 

 meant so much for us. 



No one can read the early life of the " father of 

 railways " without appreciating that he was from 

 young manhood a searcher after scientific knowledge. 

 The advances he gave to the world of transport were 

 all due to his practical application of the knowledge 

 he had obtained himself or had learned from others^ 

 It is so often thought that because the early inventors 

 and engineers of the beginning of last centur)' had not 

 received what we now call a scientific education that 

 they were not in any sense of the term men of science. 

 It must be remembered that at that time the knowledge ? 

 of natural phenomena was ver\- limited, and it was 

 possible to know much more easily all the information 

 available on a subject than at the present day, when 

 we have such a mass of miscellaneous information to- 

 hand on every conceivable subject. It was ordered 

 knowledge which led Stephenson to adopt the blast- 

 pipe of Trevithick. It was the desirability of obtaining 

 ordered knowledge that caused him to earn.' out those 

 experiments which showed to him the advantages of 

 using rails, and it was the scientific appreciation of the 

 necessity of increased heating surface that made him 

 adopt the suggestion of using tubes through the water 

 space in the boiler of the " Rocket." His appreciation 

 of the advantages of science was shown by his accept- 

 ance of the presidency of the Mechanical Science 

 Section (then as now Section G) of the British Associa- 

 tion in 1838, and it is interesting to note that one of 

 the earliest grants in Section G was for a constant 

 indicator (for locomotives) and dynamometric instru- 

 ments in 1842-43, while Stephenson was still alive. 



From the time of Stephenson the progress in pror 

 pulsion on rails by steam locomotives was steady if 

 slow. The investigations for a long while were largely- 

 confined to the question of expansion and condensation, 

 and although the results attained were noteworthy in 

 the case of steamships, on the rail there was little 

 advance in the principle of propulsion, although the 

 improvements in materials allowed a steady growth in 

 power and size. Although work was done by com- 

 pounding and using higher pressures, the greatest 



