BORIS BURDA: How to Transport Heavy Cargo by Ferry
Trevithick’s locomotive from Coalbrookdale, 1803 / wikipedia.org
ATTENTION — QUESTION!
During one of the first locomotive trials, a lady kept shouting: «It won’t go! It won’t go!» When the locomotive started moving, she kept shouting. What exactly?
ATTENTION — CORRECT ANSWER!
«It won’t stop! It won’t stop!»
STEAM HAS POWER
P
erhaps the first person to move something using steam was Heron of Alexandria, a contemporary of our era and the inventor of many amusing automatons. One of them, the «Aeolipile», was a spinning device powered by steam — essentially a miniature steam turbine. It served no practical purpose, which suited Heron just fine, as he was a typical scholar of antiquity.
And so people continued to haul heavy loads on their own backs. Don’t buy into the myths about thousand-ton stones from Syria’s Baalbek that supposedly only aliens could have moved — the pedestal of the Peter the Great monument in St. Petersburg was heavier than any stone from Baalbek, and it was hauled manually just fine. Animals were also used, even elephants. But not steam.
Only by the 17th century did the two great engines of culture — science and enlightenment — generate enough critical knowledge to harness steam for motion. In 1690, the Frenchman Denis Papin created a steam engine, and by 1707, he installed it on a boat and floated down the River Weser — until local boatmen, fearing competition, smashed his invention to pieces.
It wasn’t until 1769 that Frenchman Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot adapted the idea from water to land, building a steam-powered carriage to transport cannons. It moved decently but was difficult to control, crashing into a wall of the Paris Arsenal during trials. To make matters worse, Cugnot’s patron minister fell from grace, and the project was shelved. Yet modern replicas of Cugnot’s machine run just fine — so it certainly could have worked!
Having failed on both water and land, the steam engine found its way underground — in 1705, Thomas Newcomen adapted it to pump water from mines. Later, James Watt significantly improved Newcomen’s machine by inventing a separate condenser, which drastically enhanced its efficiency. This engine clearly had the potential to power movement — and it wouldn’t be long before it did.
The next step was taken by Richard Trevithick, who, in 1801, built the first steam locomotive in history. Trevithick’s early locomotives didn’t yet run on rails but on tracks made of steel plates, which they occasionally broke under their own weight. However, his machine — aptly named Catch Me Who Can — already reached speeds of 30 km/h. Just one step remained…
NOT QUITE ORDINARY
A promising invention usually attracts a crowd — the era of the lone genius is over if it ever truly existed. And the prize doesn’t always go to the one who gets there first (just ask Antonio Meucci, whom even the U.S. Congress recognized as the inventor of the telephone — but everyone still thinks of Bell, and there’s no changing that). You have to arrive brilliantly!
George Stephenson did just that — no, he didn’t invent the first locomotive, but without him, locomotives might have remained a curious amusement or a failed experiment for a long time. He was an exceptional man — born into poverty, the son of a colliery worker, he started working at a mine at the age of 8 and only began learning to read and write at 18, paying for his own education. Not everyone could manage that…
He couldn’t propose to his first love — for someone so poor, it was out of the question. So he married the daughter of a poor farmer who was 12 years his senior. They had a son, who later became his loyal assistant, but his wife died during a second unsuccessful childbirth. Then his father was blinded by a steam burn, and Stephenson couldn’t even emigrate to the U.S. like his sister — he had to stay and care for his father.
Incidentally, his first love, Elizabeth Hindmarsh, waited for him for 20 years, and when he was a grown man and already successful, he did marry her — they lived happily together for many years. As you can see, Stephenson knew how to wait — and learn, too. He became a steam engine mechanic and later taught himself to design them. At one point, he even invented a perpetual motion machine… which, unsurprisingly, didn’t work.
A man of many talents, he also invented a safety lamp for miners — just as effective as the one created by the renowned chemist Humphry Davy, who received a hefty award for his version. Many in Britain believed Stephenson deserved recognition, too — and they collected the same amount for him. Good on them — we could use more of that spirit ourselves…
OUR LOCOMOTIVE, FLY FORWARD!
So why was it Stephenson, who didn’t invent the locomotive, who successfully implemented it? He was meticulous enough to equip it with a host of improvements that made the locomotive practical and cost-effective — from modern rails to a proper smokestack, not to mention a quality transmission system. In short, he refined the machine.
Stephenson’s predecessors were so afraid of steep inclines that they replaced wheels with cogged rails — not to mention Brunton’s locomotive, which pushed itself along using leg-like appendages. Some even feared people would panic at the sight of glowing-hot chimneys and fireboxes — but Stephenson calmly replied that people would just think those parts were painted red.
In 1821, the British Parliament approved the construction of a horse-drawn railway from Stockton to Darlington but later allowed locomotives as well. It was at Stephenson’s suggestion that the railway gauge was set at 1,435 millimeters — a standard later adopted by most of the world (except Russia, of course…).
Naturally, one shouldn’t believe the engineering anecdote that Tsar Nicholas I wrote a crude «Make it wider, damn it!» note on the proposal for the Russian railway gauge, prompting obedient officials to make it precisely half a foot wider, matching the tsar’s infamous… proportions. The real reason was simply that the Russians consulted the American engineer George Whistler — and the U.S. used a wider gauge.
In 1823, the world’s first locomotive factory was built in Newcastle for that very railway, and Stephenson invested his safety lamp award money into it. In 1825, Stephenson himself drove the first locomotive along the line — pulling 34 wagons with a total weight of 80 tons, including a passenger car with benches for the public, at speeds of up to 24 km/h.
MANCHESTER — LIVERPOOL
Remember the melody that accompanied weather forecasts on Soviet TV? It was called «Manchester — Liverpool», and not by chance — for Britain, this was the first railway connecting two major cities. Horse-drawn transport and shipping canals couldn’t handle the volume of goods on this route, so it was time to give way to something new.
A locomotive competition was organized to determine the best design. The «Cyclops» locomotive was disqualified when it was discovered to be powered by a horse hidden inside, turning the wheels (though it probably would’ve lost anyway). The locomotives Novelty, Perseverance, and Sans Pareil competed against Stephenson’s newest model — the Rocket.
Stephenson won — his Rocket was the only one to complete all trials without a malfunction. So, on September 15, 1830, he himself drove the locomotive from Manchester to Liverpool (his son and brother operated the other two engines). Everything went well, except for the tragic accident in which Member of Parliament William Huskisson ran to greet the Prime Minister and was struck by a train. Fortunately, Stephenson wasn’t held responsible.
At the time, Miron Cherepanov came to England to study advanced technology. Upon returning, he and his father, Yefim, built the first locomotive line in the Russian Empire, in the Urals. The nearby forests were quickly depleted for fuel, and the line ceased operation. About 80 years ago, Soviet textbooks claimed the Cherepanovs invented the locomotive — amusing, to say the least…
Soon after, Stephenson’s locomotives spread across the globe in a vast network of rails (as of 2022, totaling approximately 1,370,000 kilometers). Locomotives have long since been replaced by diesel and electric trains, and the phrase «as efficient as a steam engine» is used ironically to imply low efficiency — but it was George Stephenson, the son of a poor colliery worker, who laid the first tracks.
And one more curious fact: Albert Einstein himself said his interest in science began with a beautiful toy gifted to him in early childhood by his uncle. Do you know what it was? A scaled-down replica of George Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive — yes, that very one. So, even the theory of relativity is a kind of relative of the steam engine.
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