First
Locomotives in America._]

[Illustration: The first railroad train in New Jersey (1831)]

The puffing little locomotive bore little resemblance to its beautiful
and powerful successors. No cab sheltered the engineer, no brake checked
the speed, wood was the only fuel, and the tall smokestack belched forth
smoke and red-hot cinders. But this was nothing to what happened when
the train came to a bridge. Such structures were then protected by
roofing them and boarding the sides almost to the eaves. But the roof
was always too low to allow the smokestack to go under. The stack,
therefore, was jointed, and when passing through a bridge the upper half
was dropped down and the whole train in consequence was enveloped in a
cloud of smoke and burning cinders, while the passengers covered their
eyes, mouths, and noses.

%320. Railroads in 1835.%--In 1835 there were twenty-two railroads in
operation in the United States. Two were west of the Alleghanies, and
not one was 140 miles long. For a while the cars ran on "strap rails"
made of wooden beams or stringers laid on stone blocks and protected on
the top surface, where the car wheel rested, by long strips or straps
of iron spiked on. The spikes would often work loose, and, as the car
passed over, the strap would curl up and come through the bottom of the
car, making what was called a snake head. It was some time before the
all-iron rail came into use, and even then it was a small affair
compared with the huge rails that are used at present.

%321. Mechanical Inventions.%--The introduction of the steamboat and
the railroad, the great development of manufactures, the growth of the
West, and the immense opportunity for doing business which these
conditions offered, led to all sorts of demands for labor-saving and
time-saving machinery. Another very marked characteristic of the period
1825-1840, therefore, is the display of the inventive genius of the
people. Articles which a few years before were made by hand now began to
be made by machinery.

Before 1825 every farmer in the country threshed his grain with a flail,
or by driving cattle over it, or by means of a large wooden roller
covered with pegs. After 1825 these rude devices began to be supplanted
by the threshing machine. Till 1826 no axes, hatchets, chisels, planes,
or other edge tools were made in this country. In 1826 their manufacture
was begun, and in the following year there was opened the first hardware
stor