hick, captain in a tin-mine, took up the torch, built a 'Dragon'
for use on the common highway, but was baffled by the {10} hopeless
badness of the roads, and turned to making a locomotive for use on the
iron ways of the Welsh collieries. Two years later, in 1803, he had
constructed an ingenious engine, which could haul a ten-ton load five
miles an hour, but the engine jolted the road to pieces, and the
versatile inventor was diverted to other schemes. Blenkinsop of Leeds
in 1812 had an engine built with a toothed wheel working in a racked
rail, which did years of good service; and next year at Wylam on the
Tyne a colliery owner, Blackett, had the _Puffing Billy_ built, and
proved that smooth wheels would grip smooth rails. Still another year,
and an engine-wright in a Tyneside colliery, George Stephenson, himself
born at Wylam, devised the _Bluecher_, doubling effectiveness by turning
the exhaust steam into the chimney to create a strong draught. Using
this steam blast, and adopting the multitubular boiler from a French
inventor, Seguin, Stephenson finally scored a triumph, due not so much
to unparalleled genius as to dogged perseverance in working out his own
ideas and in adapting the ideas of other men.

Thus by slow steps the steam railway had come. It was a necessity of
the age. Crude means of transport might serve the need of {11} earlier
days when each district was self-contained and self-sufficing. But now
the small workshop and the craftsman's tool were giving way to the huge
factory and the power-driven machine. The division of labour was
growing more complex. Each district was becoming more dependent on
others for markets in which to buy and to sell. Traffic was
multiplying. The industrial revolution brought the railway, and the
railway quickened the pace of the industrial revolution.

To some critics, as to Ruskin, railways have appeared 'the loathesomest
form of deviltry now extant, animated and deliberate earthquakes,
destructive of all nice social habits or possible natural beauty.'
Animated and deliberate earthquakes they were indeed to prove,
transforming social and industrial and political structures the world
over. With the telegraph and the telephone, they greatly widened the
scope and quickened the pace of business operations, making it
possible, and therefore necessary, for the captain of industry or
finance of the twentieth century to have under control ten times the
press of affairs