:
The Novelty, John Braithwaite and John Ericsson; The Sanspareil, Timothy
Hackworth; The Rocket, George and Robert Stephenson. These were
not horses; they were locomotives. The directors of the London and
Manchester Railway had offered a prize of five hundred pounds for the
best locomotive, and here they were to try the issue.

The contest resulted in the triumph of Stephenson's Rocket. The others
fell early out of the race. The Rocket alone met all the requirements
and won the prize. So it happened that George Stephenson came into
fame and has ever since lived in popular memory as the father of
the locomotive. There was nothing new in his Rocket, except his own
workmanship. Like Robert Fulton, he appears to have succeeded where
others failed because he was a sounder engineer, or a better combiner of
sound principles into a working, whole, than any of his rivals.

Across the Atlantic came the news of Stephenson's remarkable success.
And by this time railroads were beginning in various parts of the United
States: the Mohawk and Hudson, from Albany to Schenectady; the Baltimore
and Ohio; the Charleston and Hamburg in South Carolina; the Camden and
Amboy, across New Jersey. Horses, mules, and even sails, furnished the
power for these early railroads. It can be imagined with what interest
the owners of these roads heard that at last a practicable locomotive
was running in England.

This news stimulated the directors of the Baltimore and Ohio to try the
locomotive. They had not far to go for an experiment, for Peter Cooper,
proprietor of the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore, had already designed
a small locomotive, the Tom Thumb. This was placed on trial in August,
1830, and is supposed to have been the first American-built locomotive
to do work on rails, though nearly coincident with it was the Best
Friend of Charleston, built by the West Point Foundry, New York, for the
Charleston and Hamburg Railroad. It is often difficult, as we have seen,
to say which of two or several things was first. It appears as though
the little Tom Thumb was the first engine built in America, which
actually pulled weight on a regular railway, while the much larger Best
Friend was the first to haul cars in regular daily service.

The West Point Foundry followed its first success with the West Point,
which also went into service on the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad, and
then built for the newly finished Mohawk and Hudson (the first link in
the