G.—ENGINEERING, 163 
a distinguished son of Liverpool, and the Directors of the Lancashire and 
Yorkshire Railway. The electrification of the line was preceded by 
exhaustive trials to determine the tractive force required to overcome 
the resistance on railways,’ and with these trials I had the honour of 
being connected. 
The other matter in which Liverpool has done pioneer work on 
traction is that of heavy motor traffic. From its inception in 1895 
the Liverpool Self-propelled Traffic Association was specially connected 
with this method of transport. Under the presidency of the late Sir 
Alfred Jones, with the guidance of Dr. Hele Shaw and under the 
organising ability of its enthusiastic and energetic secretary, Mr. E. 
Shrapnell Smith, it organised and carried out trials of commercial 
vehicles in 1898, 1899, and 1901. In May 1898 were carried out the 
first. practical trials of these vehicles held in the country, and I had the 
honour of being the observer of the first lorry to leave the yard. The 
Motor Car Act of 1908, which allowed a practical weight for commercial 
road motor vehicles, was the result of a deputation of the Liverpool 
Self-propelled Traffic Association waiting on the President of the Local 
Government Board (the Right Hon. Walter Long, now Viscount Long) 
when he was on a visit to Liverpool. 
I think I have said enough to justify the statement I made that 
it is fitting that one of our sessions here in this city of Liverpool should 
be devoted to the question of transport, and I wish to speak of its 
indebtedness to Science, and trust I may be able to show that, as 
with other branches of engineering, its progress is due to science, and, 
in concluding, speak of how it may repay, if inadequately, the debt 
under which it is placed. 
We are perhaps too apt at the present time to forget the obligation 
which the world owes. to transportation, so commonplace have the 
improved methods become. We are already forgetting the lesson that 
the submarine menace gave us on this matter during the War, and 
again looking upon the movement of matter from point to point as a 
commonplace occurrence. It has been said that effective transporta- 
tion is one of the great aids to civilisation, but it must not be forgotten 
that all movement of material from place to place is economically waste 
as far as the dissipation of work is concerned. Problems of transporta- 
tion have been solyed more or less successfully in all ages, and some 
of them, such as the moving of the stone to Stonehenge, &c., still excite 
our wonder and admiration. Such works, and similar ones of much 
greater magnitude in the East, however, we feel as engineers 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 which 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 
1 See Mr. (Sir) J. A. F. Aspinall’s paper on ‘ Train Resistance,’ Proceedings 
of the Institution of Civil Engineers, vol. 147, 1901. 
