of
England, the need grew clear of better highways to bear the heavy
cart-loads to market or riverside. About 1630 one Master Beaumont laid
down broad {6} wooden rails near Newcastle, on which a single horse
could haul fifty or sixty bushels of coal. The new device spread
rapidly through the whole Tyneside coal-field. A century later it
became the custom to nail thin strips of wrought iron to the wooden
rails, and about 1767 cast-iron rails were first used. Carr, a
Sheffield colliery manager, invented a flanged rail, while Jessop,
another colliery engineer, took the other line by using flat rails but
flanged cart-wheels. The outburst of canal building in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century overshadowed for a time the growth of
the iron road, but it soon became clear that the 'tramway' was
necessary to supplement, if not to complete, the canal. In 1801 the
first public line, the Surrey Iron Railway, was chartered, but it was
not until 1825 that the success of the Stockton and Darlington Railway
proved that the iron way could be made as useful to the general
shipping public as to the colliery owner. At the outset this road was
regarded as only a special sort of toll-road upon which any carrier
might transport goods or passengers in his own vehicles, but experience
speedily made it necessary for the company to undertake the complete
service.

It took longer to find the new motive power, {7} but this, too, first
came into practical use in the land where peace and liberty gave
industry the fostering care which the war-rent Continent could never
guarantee. Nowadays it seems a simple thing to turn heat energy into
mechanical energy, to utilize the familiar expansive power of water
heated to vapour. Yet centuries of experiment, slowly acquired
mechanical dexterity, and an industrial atmosphere were needed for the
development of the steam-engine, and later of the locomotive.
Inventiveness was not lacking in the earlier days. In the second
century before Christ, Hero of Alexandria had devised steam fountains
and steam turbines, but they remained scientific toys, unless for the
miracle-working purposes to which legend says that eastern priests
adapted them. So in the seventeenth century, when the Norman, Solomon
de Caus, claimed that with the vapour of boiling water he could move
carriages and navigate ships, Cardinal Richelieu had him put in prison
as a madman. About 1628 an Italian, Giovanni Branca, invented