Stephenson's Forerunner.

More than forty years had passed since Murdoch, a pupil of the great Watt, had startled the natives of Cornwall by careering along a road on the outskirts of Redruth in a weird-looking machine on three wheels, vomiting smoke. Little wonder that at such an uncanny spectacle the simple Cornish folk, on their way home from church, either gazed at it in petrified amazement, or took to their heels in panic, assured that the driver of the “snorting abomination” was no other than the Evil One himself.

But Murdoch could afford to smile at the sensation and horror he had caused, for he had triumphantly proved the possibilities of steam as a locomotive power. For long years stationary engines had done excellent work at the pit-heads, pulling up truck-loads of coal, but, until the adventurous Murdoch drove his crude engine along these Cornish roads, steam had never been used as a means of propulsion.

And where Murdoch led the way, a rival engineer-Richard Trevithick-was not long in following. Designing an engine on improved lines he soon had his locomotives busy drawing coal-trucks on many a colliery line in South Wales. It is true that they were not very reliable-they had mutinous moods when they refused to work at all, and had frequent breakdowns-but, on the whole, they were a great improvement in speed and economy on horsetraction.

But Trevithick was by no means satisfied, that his engines should be used only for pulling coal-trucks; his ambition was to employ them for passenger traffic; and, in order to introduce and popularise their use, he took one of them to London, rented a piece of ground on the site now occupied by Euston Station, constructed a small circular railway, and carried curious and excited passengers round it by the thousand at a shilling a head.

But though the new “toy” naturally attracted considerable attention, it was still regarded as a toy and nothing else. It was too ludicrous to think that it could possibly be of any real practical use. And when, a few years later, it was seriously proposed to construct railway lines for the conveyance of passengers and cargo, the whole country was up in arms. Such a scheme, was seen, would be the ruin of the stage coaches and canals, which had hitherto served all the needs of locomotion, and in which large sums of money were invested. Hundreds of coaching-houses would have to be closed. Land owners declared, purple-faced, that the engines would utterly spoil their game preserves and set fire to their stacks, and the railway would cut up their lands and parks; while the people at large pictured all kinds of horrors from the blowing up of the engines to terrible collisions.