Auii^. 26, 1875] 



NA TURE 



343 



except to a few, that fjentleman received a reply from Mr. Barrow, 

 " that telejjraphs of any kind were then wholly unnecessary, and 

 that no other than the one then in use would be adopted ; " the 

 one then in use being the old semaphore, which, crowning the 

 tops of hills between London and Portsmouth, seemed per- 

 fection to the Admiralty of that day. 



I am acquainted with some who, when the first Transatlantic 

 cable was proposed, contributed towards that undertaking with 

 the consciousness that it was only an experiment, and that sub- 

 scribing to it was much the same thing as throwing their money 

 into the sea. Much of this cable was lost in the first attempt to 

 lay it ; but its promoters, nothing daunted, made 900 miles more 

 cable, and finally laid it successfully in the following year, 1858. 



The telegraphic system of the world comprises almost a com- 

 j)lete girdle round the earih ; and it is v>robable that the missing 

 link will be supplied by a cable between San Francisco in Cali- 

 lornia and Yokohama in Japan. 



How resolute and courageous those who engaged in subma- 

 rine telegraphy have been will appear from the fact thaf, though 

 we have now 5o,cxx) miles of cable in use, to get at this result 

 nearly 70,000 miles were constructed and laid. This large per- 

 centage of failure, in the opinion of Ur. C. W. Siemens (to whom 

 I am much indebted for information on this subject), was partly 

 due to the late introduction of testing a cable under water before 

 it is laid, and to the use of too light iron sheathing. 



Of immense importance in connection with tke subsequent 

 extension of submarine cables have been the discoveries of Ohm 

 and Sir William Thomson, and the knowledge obtained that the 

 resistance in wire of homogeneous metal is directly proportional 

 to the length, so that the place of a fault in a cable of many 

 thousand miles in length can be ascertained with so much pie- 

 cision as to enable you to go at once to repair it, although the 

 damaged cable may lie in some thousands of fathoms of water. 



Of lailways the progress has been enormous, but I do not know 

 that in a scier.tific point of view a railway is so marvellous in its 

 character as the electric telegraph. The results, however, of the 

 construction and use of railways are more extensive and wide- 

 spread, and their utility and convenience brought home to a 

 larger portion of mankind. It has come to pass, therefore, that 

 the name of Gecrge Stephenson has bten placed second only 

 to that of James Watt ; and as men are and will be estimated by 

 the advantages which Iheir labours confer on mankind, he wdl 

 remain in that niche, unless indeed some greater luminary should 

 arise to outshine him. The merit of George Stephenson con- 

 sisted, among other things, in this, that he saw more clearly than 

 any other engineer of his time the sort of thing that the world 

 wanted, and that he persevered in despite of learned objectors 

 with the firm conviction that he was right and they were wrong, 

 and that there was within himself the power to demonstrate the 

 ascuracy of his convictions. 



Railways are a subject on which I may (I hope without tiring 

 you) speak somewhat more at length. The British Association 

 is peripatetic, and without railways its meetiirgs, if held at all, 

 would, I fear, be greatly reduced in numbers. Moreover, you 

 have all an interest in them : you all demand to be carried safely, 

 and you insist on being carried fast. Besides, everybody under- 

 stands, or thinks he understands, a railway, and therefore! shall 

 be speaking on a subject common to all of us, and shall possibly 

 only put before you ideas which others as well as ^myielf have 

 alieady entertained. 



We who live in these days of roads and railways, and can 

 move with a fair degree of comfort, speed, and safety, almost 

 where we will, can scarcely realise the state of England two 

 centuries ago, when the years of opposition which preceded the 

 era of coaches began ; when, as in 1662, there were but six stages 

 in all England, and John Crossdell, of the Charterhouse, thought 

 there were six too many ; when Sir Henry Herbert, a member 

 of the House of Commons, could say, *' If a man were to pro- 

 pose to carry us regularly to Edinburgh in coaches in seven days, 

 and bring us back in seven more, should we not vote him to 

 Bedlam ? " 



In spite of short-sighted opposition, coaches made their way ; 

 but it was not till a century later, in 1784 — and then I believe it 

 was in this city of Bristol — that coaches were first established 

 for the conveyance of mails. Those here who have experienced, 

 as I have, what the discomforts were of long journeys inside the 

 old coaches, will agree with me that they were very great ; and 

 . I believe, if returns could be obtained of the accidents which 

 happened to coaches, it would be found that many more people 

 were injured and killed in proportion to the number that tra- 

 velled by that mode than by the railways of to-day. 



No sooner had our ancestors settled down with what comfort 

 was possible in their coaches, well satisfied that twelve miles an 

 hour was the maximum speed to be obtained or that was desir- 

 able, than they were told that steam conveyance on iron railways 

 would supersede iheir "present pitiful" methods of conveyance. 

 Such was the opinion of Thomas Gray, the first promoter of 

 railways, who published his work on a general iron railway in 

 1819. Gray was looked on as little better than a madman. 



"When Gray first proposed 1 is great scheme to the public," 

 said Chevalier Wilson, in a letter to Sir Robert Peel in 1845, 

 " people were disposed to treat it as an effusion of insanity." I 

 shall not enter on a history of the struggles which preceded the 

 opening of the first railway. They were brought to a successful 

 issue by the determination of a few able and far-seeing men. 

 The names of Thomas Gray and Joseph Sandar.«, of William 

 James and Edward Pease, should always be remembered in con- 

 nection with the early history of railways, for it was they who 

 first made the nation familiar with the idea. There is no fear 

 that the name of Stephenson will be forgotten, whose practical 

 genius made the realisation of the idea possible. 



The Stockton and Darlington Railway was opened in 1825, 

 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, and in the short 

 time which has since elapsed, railways have been extended to 

 every quarter of the globe. No nation possessing wealth and 

 population can afford to be without them ; and though at present 

 in different countries there is in the aggregate about 160,000 miles 

 of railway, it is certain that in the course of a very lew years 

 this quantity, large as it is, will be very greatly exceeded. 



Railways add enormously to the national wealth. More than 

 twenty-five years ago it was proved to the satisfaction of a com- 

 mittee of the House of Commons, from facts and figures which 

 I then adduced, that the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railv/ay, of 

 which I was the engineer, and which then formed the principal 

 railway connection between ihe populot^s towns of Lancashire 

 and Yorkshire, effected a saving to the public using the railway 

 of more than the whole amount of the dividend which was 

 received by the proprietors. These calculations were based solely 

 on the amount of traffic carried by the railway, and on the 

 difference between the 1 ail way rate of charge and the charges by 

 the modes of conveyance anterior to railways. No credit what- 

 ever was taken for the saving of time, though in England pre- 

 eminently time is money. 



Considering that railway charges on many items have been 

 considerably reduced since that day, it may be safely assumed 

 that the railways in the British Islands now produce, or rather 

 save to the nation, a much larger sum annually than the gross 

 amount of all the dividends payable to the proprietors, without 

 at all taking into account the benefit arising from the saving in 

 time. The benefits under that head defy calculation, and cannot 

 wiih any accuracy be put into money ; but it would not be at all 

 over-estimating this question to say that in time and money the 

 nation gains at least what is equivalent to 10 ptr cent, on all the 

 cipital expended on railways. I do not urge this on the part of 

 railway proprietors, for they did not embark in these undertak- 

 ings with a view to the national gain, but for the expected piofit 

 to themselves. Yet it is as well it should be noted, for railway 

 proprietors appear sometimia by some people to be regaided in 

 the light of public enemies. 



It follows from these facts that whenever a railway can be 

 made at a cost to yield the ordinary interest of money, it is in 

 the national interest that it should be made. Further, that 

 though its cost might be such as to leave a smaller dividend than 

 that to its proprietors, the loss of wealth to so small a section of 

 the community will be more than supplemented by the national 

 gain, and therefore there may be cases where a Government may 

 wisely contribute in some form to undertakings which, without 

 such aid, would fail to obtain the necessary support. 



And so some countries, Russia for instance, to which impioved 

 means of transport are of vital imporunce, have wisely, in my 

 opinion, caused lines to be made which, having regard to their 

 own expenditure and receipts, would be unprofitable works, but 

 in a national point of view are or speedily will be highly advan. 

 tageous. 



The Empire of Brazil, which I have lately visited, is arriving 

 at the conclusion, which I think not an unwise one, that the 

 State can afford, and will be benefited in the end, by guaranteeing 

 7 per cent, upon any railway that can of itself be shown to pro- 

 duce a net income of 4 per cent., on the assumption that the 

 nation will be benefited at least to the extent of the difference. 



A question more important probably in the eyes of many — 

 safety of railway travelling— may not be inappropriate. At all 



