Mr.
Cooper's characteristic recollection, more than sixty years later, was
that, "with the exception of a dangerous explosion," which nearly cost
him his life, the charcoal kilns were "a great success!"

But the great value of the property was expected to be realized through
the new railroad; and this expectation suffered a serious blow when the
horse cars failed to pay expenses; the operation of the line was
suspended; the directors lost faith in the enterprise; and many of the
principal stockholders declared that they would rather lose the
investment made so far than "throw good money after bad." For the hope
that the new agency of steam might help them out was blighted by the
news from England that Stephenson had said that steam could not be used
as a motive power on a road having curves of less than 900 feet radius;
and this road had, at Point of Rocks, a necessary curve with a radius of
only 150 feet!

The situation presented exactly the sort of challenge calculated to
arouse the courage and ingenuity of Peter Cooper, besides appealing to
another of his personal characteristics, namely, his undying and
unalterable faith in his own ideas and conclusions, whether they had
achieved recognition or not. He could lay aside a scheme which had not
found immediate and successful application, and turn his attention, with
undiminished vivacity, to something else; but he never owned to a real
defeat. And now the problem presented at Baltimore seemed to him a
providential call for his intervention. If the English engineers could
not run their locomotives around sharp curves, it must be because they
persisted in using the vicious crank, which he had already superseded by
his (temporarily unappreciated) invention! And, with unshaken faith in
that device, he informed the Baltimore and Ohio directors (to use the
words in which, long afterwards, he told the story) that he thought he
"could knock together a locomotive which would get a train around the
Point of Rocks."

It is a curious circumstance that, ever since that day, the
characteristic difference between English and American locomotives has
been the ability of the latter to pass curves of shorter radius than the
former can safely follow. The reason, as all railway engineers know, is
that the usual English construction involves a rigid frame, while the
American has a movable truck or "bogie" under the front part of the
engine. This solution of the problem was not reached b