132 TiiANSACTioss oftjikAmkhkaxIxstitute. 



the cougli of wliose engines, liad soinetimcs t^tartled the sleei)ing dee4- 

 even on the banks of the upi)er Mississi])pi. Boats made daily and 

 nightly passages from Xew York to Albany in a little more than 

 twelve hours. Toward the railroad, men had been blindly groping 

 in the canal, in coal mines, and deeper dens for nearly a century ; 

 but the first locomotive that ever ran on an iron track and drew car- 

 riages tilled with passengers behind it was made in England in the 

 year 1S29. And the first public trial of engines was made on the 

 track of the i-ailroad from Liverpool to Manchester, just as our first 

 fair was opened in October, 1829 ; though the first regular trains ol 

 passengers were not established till the following year. The first 

 three miles of iron track in America had been finished at Quincy, 

 Mass., two years before, as a similar track, nine miles long, had been 

 at Maueh Chunk, Penn, The former was designed for moving 

 granite from the quarry to navigable water, as the latter was for the 

 transportation of coal from hillside mines to a canal ; but both were 

 horse roads, and barely two locomotives had been imported into this 

 country, and none set to work when oiir first fair was held. These 

 were still employed in coal transportation. The first engine ever 

 built in this country was completed in 1830, in which year locomo- 

 tives began to carry passengers over short distances on bits of unfin- 

 ished railroad in this State, in Pennsylvania, in Maryland, and 

 possibly in North Carolina. The development of the railroad sys- 

 tem, now extended to some forty thousand miles of track in this 

 country, and a like number in Europe, at a cost fully equal to the 

 aggregate wealth of our people forty years ago, has been efi'ected 

 within the lifetime of the American Institute. We stand as yet too 

 near the origin of this application of steam and iron to secure at once 

 celerity and cheapness in the movement of passengers and products, 

 to accurately measure or fully appreciate its importance. AVe do not 

 realize the difference between reaching Washington, Boston, or 

 Utica in a few hours as we do, and being three long days in making 

 the hard, racking, wearing journey to Albany, as I have done within 

 the last thirty years. The consequent saving in time and cost i* 

 'incalculably great; and our Pacific railroad, which has brought San 

 Francisco within a Aveek of New York, is but the first of a series of 

 triumphs of man over giant ob>taeles Avliich cannot lie arrested till 

 barbarism and mental stagnation are banished fn>ni tlie eartli. The 

 electric telegraph is years younger than tlie railroad. In its prac- 

 tical workimi; condition it is barely a <juarter of a century old. As 



