The locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson

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J. Murray, 1904 - Engineers

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Page iv - England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools ; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-outang or the tiger.
Page 197 - Suppose, now, one of these engines to be going along a railroad at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour, and that a cow were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the engine ; would not that, think you, be a very awkward circumstance?"
Page 62 - I was in education, and made up my mind that he should not labour under the same defect, but that I would put him to a good school. and give him a liberal training. I was, however, a poor man ; and how do you think I managed ? I betook myself to mending my neighbours...
Page 340 - I said to my friends that there was no limit to the speed of such an engine, provided the works could be made to stand.
Page 163 - I may not live so long, when railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country, when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the Great Highway for the king and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot.
Page 100 - Railway on the 25th of July, 1814; and its powers were tried on the same day. On an ascending gradient of 1 in 450, the engine succeeded in drawing after it eight loaded carriages of thirty tons' weight at about four miles an hour ; and for some time after, it continued regularly at work.
Page 163 - ... for the king and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost insurmountable difficulties...
Page 269 - Flurried and confused, Mr Huskisson endeavoured to get round the open door of the carriage, which projected over the opposite rail; but in so doing he was struck down by the 'Rocket', and falling with his leg doubled across the rail, the limb was instantly crushed. His first words on being raised were, 'I have met my death,' which unhappily proved too true, for he expired that same evening in the neighbouring parsonage of Eccles.
Page 191 - What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage-coaches ! We would as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate.
Page 109 - Stephenson's direction the materials were forthwith carried to the required spot, where, in a very short time, a wall was raised at the entrance to the main, he himself taking the most active part in the work. The atmospheric air was by this means excluded, the fire was extinguished, most of the people in the pit were saved from death, and the mine was pieserved.

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