iameter, but not much more than half as high. It stood
upright in the car, and was filled above the furnace, which occupied the
lower section, with vertical tubes. The cylinder was but three and one
half inches in diameter; and speed was got up by gearing. No natural
draft could have been sufficient to get up steam in so small a boiler;
and Mr. Cooper used, therefore, a blowing apparatus, driven by a drum,
attached to one of the car wheels, over which passed a cord, that, in
its turn, worked a pulley on the shaft of the blower. The contrivance
for dispensing with a crank, though its general appearance is
recollected, the speaker cannot describe with any accuracy; nor is it
important,--it came to nothing. . . .

"In a patent case, tried many years afterwards, the boiler of Mr.
Cooper's engine became, in some connection which has been forgotten,
important as a piece of evidence. It was hunted for, and found among
some old rubbish at Mount Clare. It was difficult to imagine that it had
even generated steam enough to drive a coffee mill, much less that it
had performed the feats here narrated."

After this experimental demonstration, the Tom Thumb retired into
honorable but obscure repose in its maker's warehouse at New York, from
which it emerged, fifty years later, to take part in the centennial
celebration of the beginning of the commercial history of Baltimore
(that place having been made a port of entry in 1780). According to a
contemporary report of the festival, "in the vast procession, Mr. Cooper
and his little Tom Thumb locomotive were the two most conspicuous
objects, and received all the honors which could be paid by a quarter of
a million of enthusiastic people."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] These and other statements in this chapter are taken from a lecture,
delivered March 23, 1868, before the Maryland Institute, by Hon. J. H.
B. Latrobe, giving his personal recollections of the early history of
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

[4] Manuscript of his _Reminiscences_.

[5] This was the sacrifice of a favorite invention to immediate
practical considerations, which has been mentioned above as an instance
of Mr. Cooper's common sense.

VI

MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS

PETER COOPER'S acquaintance with the affairs of New York city ranged
from the time when, as a child, he was taken by his mother to see the
last remaining fragments of the stockade erected by the early
inhabitants for protection against the Indians, to