138 First American Steam Railroad (1830)

In the beginning no one dreamed of steam upon the road. Horses were to do the work and even after the line was completed to Frederick, relays of horses trotted the cars from place to place. To ride in a railroad car in those days was literally to go thundering along, the roll of the wheels on the combined rail of stone and iron being almost deafening.

When steam made its appearance on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad it attracted great attention here. But there was this difficulty about introducing an English engine on an American road. An English road was virtually a straight road. An American road had curves sometimes of as small radius as two hundred feet. For a brief season it was believed that this feature of the early American roads would prevent the use of locomotive engines. The contrary was demonstrated by a gentleman still living in an active and ripe old age, honored and beloved, distinguished for his private worth and for his public benefactions. One of those to whom wealth seems to have been granted by Providence that men might know how wealth could be used to benefit one’s fellow creatures. The speaker refers to Mr. Peter Cooper of New York.

Mr. Cooper was satisfied that steam might be adapted to the curved roads which he saw would be built in the United States and he came to Baltimore which then possessed the only one on which he could experiment, to vindicate his belief. He had another idea which was that the crank could be dispensed with in the change from a reciprocating to a rotary motion. And he built an engine to demonstrate both articles of his faith. The machine was not Larger than the hand cars used by workmen to transfer themselves from place to place and as the speaker now recalls its appearance, the only wonder is that so apparently insignificant a contrivance should ever have been regarded as competent to the smallest results. But Mr. Cooper was wiser than many of the wisest around him. His engine could not have weighed a ton but he saw in it a principle which the forty-ton engines of today have but served to develop and demonstrate.

The boiler of Mr. Cooper’s engine was not as large as the kitchen boiler attached to many a range in modern mansions. It was of about the same diameter but not much more than half as high. It stood upright in the car and was filled above the furnace, which occupied the lower section, with vertical tubes. The cylinder was but three and a half inches in diameter and speed was gotten up by gearing. No natural draught could have been sufficient to keep up steam in so small a boiler and Mr. Cooper used therefore a blowing apparatus driven by a drum attached to one of the car wheels, over which passed a cord that in its turn worked a pulley on the shaft of the blower.

Mr. Cooper’s success was such as to induce him to try a trip to Ellicott’s Mills and an open car, the first used upon the road already mentioned, having been attached to his engine and filled with the directors and some friends, the speaker among the rest, the first journey by steam in America was commenced. The trip was most interesting. The curves were passed without difficulty at a speed of fifteen miles an hour, the grades were ascended with comparative ease. The day was fine, the company in the highest spirits and some excited gentlemen of the party pulled out memorandum books and when at the highest speed, which was eighteen miles an hour, wrote their names and some connected sentences to prove that even at that great velocity it was possible to do so. The return trip from the Mills, a distance of thirteen miles, was made in fifty-seven minutes. This was in the summer of 1830.

But the triumph of this Tom Thumb engine was not altogether without a drawback. The great stage proprietors of the day were Stockton & Stokes and on this occasion a gallant gray [horse] of great beauty and power was driven by them from town attached to another car on the second track — for the Company had begun by making two tracks to the Mills — and met the engine at the Relay House on its way back. From this point it was determined to have a race home and the start being even, away went horse and engine, the snort of the one and the puff of the other keeping time and tune. At first the gray had the best of it, for his steam would be applied to the greatest advantage on the instant while the engine had to wait until the rotation of the wheels set the blower to work.

The horse was perhaps a quarter of a mile ahead when the safety valve of the engine lifted and the thin blue vapor issuing from it showed an excess of steam. The blower whistled, the steam blew off in vapory clouds, the pace increased, the passengers shouted, the engine gained on the horse, the race was neck and neck, nose and nose. Then the engine passed the horse and a great hurrah hailed the victory. But it was not repeated, for just at this time when the gray’s master was about giving up, the band which drove the pulley which drove the blower slipped from the drum. The safety valve ceased to scream and the engine for want of breath began to wheeze and pant. In vain Mr. Cooper, who was his own engineman and fireman, lacerated his hands in attempting to replace the band upon the wheel. In vain he tried to urge the fire with light wood. The horse gained on the machine and passed it and although the band was presently replaced and steam again did its best, the horse was too far ahead to be overtaken and came in the winner of the race. But the real victory was with Mr. Cooper, notwithstanding. He had held fast to the faith that was in him and had demonstrated its truth beyond peradventure. All honor to his name.

In the Musée d’Artillerie at Paris there are preserved old cannon, contemporary almost with Crecy and Poictiers. In some great museum of internal improvement, and some such will at some future day be gotten up, Mr. Peter Cooper’s boiler should hold an equally prominent and far more honored place. For while the old weapons of destruction were ministers of man’s wrath, the contrivance we have described was one of the most potential instruments in making available in America that vast system which unites remote peoples and promotes that peace on earth and good will to men which angels have proclaimed.

Source: John H. B. Latrobe, The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad: Personal Recollections (1868), 12-18. https://archive.org/details/toldcontemporari03hartrich/page/560/mode/2up