1.—ENGINEERING, 165 
the firm of Boulton & Watt corresponded with Fulton 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 be 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. Doubtless he owed much to the 
friendship of Sir William Fairbairn, the President of our Association in 
1861. ‘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 century had not 
received what we now call a scientific education they were not in 
any sense of the term men of science. It must be remembered that ati 
that time the knowledge of natural phenomena was very 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 miscel- 
laneous information to hand on eyery 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 carry 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 sugges- 
tion 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 our Association in 1838. It is interesting to note that 
one of the earliest grants in Section G was for a constant indicator (for 
locomotives) and dynamometric instruments in 1842-43, whilst 
Stephenson was still alive. Let me remind you of his ready grasp of 
the application of a known principle to a different object by the story of 
the invention of the steam-whistle. On the Leicester and Swannington 
Railway, which followed the Liverpool and Manchester, one of the 
Neweastle locomotive-drivers—R. Weatherburn—at a level-crossing ran 
into the cart belonging to an old lady, destroying her eggs and butter. 
Upon his return to Leicester, and reporting this to Stephenson, he was 
at once told to go down the town to a trumpet-maker and get him to 
make a trumpet which could be blown by steam. None but a mind 
in which the knowledge of natural phenomena was very carefully ordered 
could have so readily solved such a problem. 
From the time of Stephenson the progress in propulsion on rails by 
steam-locomotives was steady if slow. The investigations for a long 
while were largely confined to the question of expansion and condensa- 
tion, and although the results attained were noteworthy in the case of 
steamships, on the rail—to which for the moment I will confine myself— 
there was little advance in the principle of propulsion, but, as I shall 
show later, the improvements in materials allowed a steady growth in 
