8 2 HER OES O F INVENTION AND DISCO VER Y. 



Wilson, in a letter to Sir Robert Peel in 1845, 'people were 

 disposed to treat it as an effusion of insanity.' The struggles 

 which preceded the opening of the first railway were brought 

 10 a successful issue by the determination of a few able and fai- 

 seeing men ; and the names of Thomas Gray and Joseph 

 Sandars, of William James and Edward Pease, should always 

 be remembered in connection with the early history of railways, 

 for it was they who first made the nation familiar with the idea." 



Whatever effect Gray's persevering labours may have had in 

 directing attention to the subject of railways, he himself gained 

 neither reward nor honour. His late years were passed in 

 obscurity as a dealer in glass on commission at Exeter, in which 

 city he died in October, 1848, at the age of sixty-one. He died, 

 it is said, " steeped to tlic lips in poverty." 



In an early number of Blackwood" s Magazine we have a 

 notice of a railway in Munich nearly contemporary with the 

 [proposals of Gray : " We have received a report from Munich, 

 which, if it be not exaggerated, well deserves the attention of 

 our countrymen. A model, on a large scale, of an iron railroad, 

 invented and completed by the chief counsellor of the mines, 

 Joseph von Baader, has been received at the Royal Repository 

 for Mechanical Inventions, which is said to surpass in utility 

 whatever has been seen in England ; some say by a proportion 

 of two-thirds, altliough it costs less by half. On a space 

 perfectly level, laid with this invention, a woman or a child 

 may draw with ease a cart laden with fifteen or sixteen hundred- 

 weight. And if no greater inclination than six inches and a-half 

 on a hundred feet in length be allowed, the carts will move 

 of themselves, without any external impulse. A single horse 

 may be the means of conveying a greater weight than twenty- 

 two horses of the same strength on the best of common roads." 



