Railroad Growth in the United States - Some Interesting Facts - Troy Daily Whig Aug. 25, 1871

Railroad Growth in the United States — Some Interesting Facts . 

The following extracts are taken from a contribution to the Philadelphia North American: 

Americans, generally, speaking, appear to have a very limited degree of information in regard to the history of the locomotive and of steam travelling. 

Few of this day are aware that, as early as 1809, twenty years before the trial trip on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Oliver Evans endeavored to establish a railway between New York and Philadelphia, offering to embark every dollar he was worth in the enterprise. Yet such is the fact.

There being no railways in America, Mr. Evans, in 1787, sent draughts and specifications of his plans to England by Captain Masters, of Annapolis, Maryland. In 1794- 5, he again sent thither his plans by Joseph Stacy Sampson, of Boston, Massachusetts, and yet again in 1799 he sent thither his plan by Charles Taylor. In short, from the fact that Richard Trevithick, who in 1802 patented in England the high-pressure locomotive, introduced into Cornwall the cylindrical-flue boiler invented by Oliver Evans for his high-pressure engine, there is hardly a reasonable doubt but that he appropriated without acknowledgement the inventions of Mr. Evans. 

Oliver Evans's plan for a railway was that it "be laid so nearly level as not to deviate in any place more than two degrees, from a horizontal line, made of wood or iron, on smooth parks of broken stone or gravel, with a rail to guide the carriage, so that they may pass each other in different directions, and travel by night as well as by day." 

The sole reason why the locomotive was not used on rails in America years before it was in Great Britain, was because its inventor (Oliver Evans) had not of his own means sufficient to build a railway, and could not induce Americans in his day to subscribe one dollar. 

Hence it was that he aimed to run hie device on turnpikes, and invited co-operation, pointing at the time to the eminent success of his elevator, hopper-boy and his other inventions, which had revolutionized the manufacture of flour, also, to bis inventions for making machine cards, as evidences of the general correctness of his views, but failed to obtain co-operation, and, unlike the more fortunate Watt (who had enlisted for his low-pressure engine men of capital), Mr. Evans was compelled to furnish himself both the mental and pecuniary means for those practical demonstrations which he from time to time conducted, and referring back to which, some thirty years afterward, Elijah Galloway, the British writer on Steam, declared proved Oliver Evans to be the only true inventor of the locomotive, but also of the first practical steamboat. 

Unable to move his countrymen, Mr. Evans rendered the following remarkable prophecy:

"The present generation will use canals, the next will prefer railroads, with horses, but their more enlightened successors will employ my steam carriages on railways, as the perfection of the art of conveyance. In the mean time the steam carriage may be tested, even on the present turnpikes." 

As Oliver Evans died in 1819, and the above prediction was rendered several years prior to his death, none, with the events of to day in view, can fail to remark its perfect fulfillment. 

In 1802, Oliver Evan s agreed with James McKeever, of Kentucky, (father of the late Commodore McKeever. U. S. Navy) and Louis Valcourt, to build a boat to run on the Mississippi, between New Orleans and Natchez. The engine (Mr. Evans's high pressure engine), was built in Philadelphia, and the boat in Kentucky; both were sent to New Orleans, but when the engine arrived out, it was found that the boat had been destroyed by a hurricane. The engine was then set to sawing timber in Ne w Orleans, and Mr. Stackhouse (one of the engineers), who remained with it twelve mouths and fifteen days, states that during that period the mill was constantly at work, his words being : 

" Nothing relating to the engine broke or got out of order so as to stop the mill one hour." 

This was the kind of engine sent by Oliver Evans to drive a steamboat against the current of the Mississippi, five years before Robert Fulton started the Clermont on the Hudson, 

In 1803, Mr. Evans having built a dredging machine (believed to be the first worked by steam) to clean the docks of the port of Philadelphia, he embraced the opportunity to practically demonstrate that navigation by steam was feasible, by putting the engine on a scow in the river Schuylkill, and converting the scow into a stern-wheel steamboat, made it propel its way down that river to the Delaware and thence up to Philadelphia, passing all the vessels in the river. This, four years before Fulton started a steamboat.


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