LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY[96]

By H. G. WELLS

(1866—). A leading novelist, essayist and historian. Through his energy and high ability he won his way to a place in the educational world, and ultimately to a commanding position in the literary world. He writes with unusual vigor and originality. Some of his most stimulating books areThe Time Machine; The War of the Worlds; When the Sleeper Wakes; Anticipations; Tono Bungay; The Future of America; Social Forces in England and America; The History of the World.

Some essays go beyond the world of little things and set forward their writers' meditations on matters of great import. Such essays look back across the whole field of history or look forward into the remoteness of the future. In essays of this kind Mr. H. G. Wells has done much to stimulate thought.In the selection that follows Mr. Wells traces the development of locomotion from the days of wagons to the days of steam. At the close of the selection Mr. Wells suggests to the reader that the advance to be made in the future may be as great as that which has been made in the past.

In the selection that follows Mr. Wells traces the development of locomotion from the days of wagons to the days of steam. At the close of the selection Mr. Wells suggests to the reader that the advance to be made in the future may be as great as that which has been made in the past.

The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very interesting phase in that great development of means of land transit that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam-engine running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And sincean interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind.

A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the history of the world?

Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the development strikes one—as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin[97]strikes one—as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the need for the railway and steam-engine had only just arisen, and—to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man—the demand created the supply; it was quite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for such things at the time; the current needs of the European world seem to have been fairly well served by coach and diligence in 1800, and, on the other hand, every administrator of intelligence in the Roman and Chinese empires must have felt an urgent need for more rapid methods of transit than those at his disposal. Nor was the development of the steam locomotive the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and something of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known for two thousand years; it had been used for pumping water, opening doors, and working toys before the Christian era. It may be urged that this advance was the outcome of that new and more systematic handling of knowledge initiated by Lord Bacon[98]and sustained by the Royal Society;[99]but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of mind that spread outward from that center played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's[100]engine was running along its rails and Evans'[101]boat was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot[102]expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our attribution of the steam-engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does this particular invention seem to have been directly due to the new possibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by the substitution of coal for wood in iron works, through the greater temperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in the reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities did greatly help the steam-engine in its invasion of the field of common life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series of causes, set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and in another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive factor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to have supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for two thousand years in the group of conditions that were necessary before the steam locomotive could appear.

This missing ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple, profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam utilization could be worked out. If onestudies Stephenson's “Rocket”[103]in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existencede novo,[104]however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in low, hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the Alleghenies, for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quite unprecedented pumping appliances became necessary, and the thoughts of practical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the laborers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates in England—rather as a toy than in earnest—before the middle of the seventeenth century, and the attempt to employ it was so obvious as to be practically unavoidable.[105]The water trickling into the coal measures[106]acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals that have long been mixed together, dry and inert. Immediately the latent reactions were set going. Savery,[11] Newcome,[107]a host of other workers culminating in Watt,[108]working always by steps that were at least so nearly obvious as to give rise again and again to simultaneous discoveries, changed this toy of steam into areal, a commercial thing, developed a trade in pumping-engines, created foundries and a new art of engineering, and, almost unconscious of what they were doing, made the steam locomotive a well-nigh unavoidable consequence. At last, after a century of improvement on pumping-engines, there remained nothing but the very obvious stage of getting the engine that had been developed on wheels and out upon the ways of the world.

Ever and ever again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the roads and pronounced a failure—one monstrous Palæoferric creature[109]was visible on a French high-road as early as 1769—but by the dawn of the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By 1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and almost financially possible, and from his hands it puffed its way, slowly at first, and then, under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive—but for all that it was primarilya steam-engine for pumpingadapted to a new end; it was a steam-engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions that were by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that fact followed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy for the high-road—it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked are steam-engines and railways in our minds, that, in common language now, the latter implies the former. But, indeed, it is the result of accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties, that we travel to-day on rails.

Railway traveling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal of locomotive convenience, so far as travelers are concerned, is surely a highly mobile conveyance capable of traveling easily and swiftly to any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, the ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speed and long-distance traveling to specialized ways restricted to swifttraffic and possibly furnished with guide rails. For the collection and delivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system is obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such a system would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles that the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at once upon the ways without interference with the established traffic. Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first, the traveler would now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of from seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the trouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arise between the household or hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been at least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had it been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise to compromise as it always has done, and as it will do very probably for many centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with an infinitely more practicable method of communication, but with one capable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year.

But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately cheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth Century Progress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in acul-de-sac.[110]The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, and their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways that were already in existence—chiefly for the transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a very interesting and curious result.

These tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinary cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw in the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or found anything incongruousin letting the dimensions of a horse determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have seemed “Utopian”[111]—a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents—to propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge—the 4 foot 8-1/2 inch gauge—nemine contradicente,[112]established itself in the world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that limits alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens catastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most authorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel so far as existing conditions go.[113]Only a revolutionary reconstruction of the railways or the development of some new competing method of land travel can carry us beyond that.

People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and sky; they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one. But if only they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of all influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enough that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the whole world is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains of horse-wagons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon wheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely to remain the predominant method of land locomotion, even for so short a period as the next hundred years?

1. The Development of Steam Boats11. Steps Toward the Use of Motor Trucks2. The Development of the Automobile12. The Improvement of Highways3. The Development of the Airplane13. The Evolution of Good Sidewalks4. The Development of the Bicycle14. The Development of the Telephone5. The Story of Roller Skates15. Improved Railway Stations6. The Development of Comfort in Travel16. The Use of Voting Machines7. The Story of the Sleeping Car17. The Protection of the Food Supply8. The Development of the Dining Car18. The Increase of Forest Protection9. Comfort in Modern Carriages19. The Work of the Weather Bureau10. The Development of the Mail System20. The Development of the Wireless Telegraph.

Before you can write upon any such subject as the one upon which Mr. Wells wrote it will be necessary for you to obtain a wideamount of information. Go to any encyclopedia and find lines along which you can investigate further. Then consult special books that you may obtain in a good library. When you have gained full information remember that it is your business not to transmit the information that you have gained, but to put down on paper the thoughts to which the information has led you. Try to show the relation between the past and the present, and to indicate some forecast for the future. Do all this in a pleasantly straightforward style as though you were talking earnestly.

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