第36章 The Dawn Of The Iron Age (4)

The idea of controlling the trade of the West by railroads was not new.As early as February, 1825, certain astute Pennsylvanians had advocated building a railroad to Pittsburgh instead of a canal, and in a memorial to the Legislature they had set forth the theory that a railroad could be built in one-third of the time and could be operated with one-third of the number of employees required by a canal, that it would never be frozen, and that its cost of construction would be less.But these arguments did not influence the majority, who felt that to follow the line of least resistance and to do as others had done would involve the least hazard.But Baltimore, with her back against the wall, did not have the alternative of a canal.It was a leap into the unknown for her or commercial stagnation.

It is regrettable that, as Baltimore began to break this fresh track, she should have had political as well as physical and mechanical obstacles to overcome.The conquest of the natural difficulties alone required superhuman effort and endurance.But Baltimore had also to fight a miserable internecine warfare in her own State, for Maryland immediately subscribed half a million to the canal as well as to the newly formed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.In rival pageants, both companies broke ground on July 4, 1828, and the race to the Ohio was on.The canal company clung doggedly to the idle belief that their enterprise was still of continental proportions, since it would connect at Cumberland with the Cumberland Road.This exaggerated estimate of the importance of the undertaking shines out in the pompous words of President Mercer, at the time when construction was begun:

"There are moments in the progress of time, which are counters of whole ages.There are events, the monuments of which, surviving every other memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to whose history they belong, after all other vestiges of its glory have disappeared from the globe.At such a moment have we now arrived."This oracular language lacks the simple but winning straightforwardness of the words which Director Morris uttered on the same day near Baltimore and which prove how distinctly Western the new railway project was held to be:

"We are about opening a channel through which the commerce of the mighty country beyond the Allegheny must seek the ocean--we are about affording facilities of intercourse between the East and West, which will bind the one more closely to the other, beyond the power of an increased population or sectional differences to disunite."The difficulties which faced the Baltimore enthusiasts in their task of keeping their city "on the map" would have daunted men of less heroic mold.Every conceivable trial and test which nature and machinery could seemingly devise was a part of their day's work for twelve years struggles with grades, locomotives, rails, cars.As Rumsey, Fitch, and Fulton in their experiments with boats had floundered despondently with endless chains, oars, paddles, duck's feet, so now Thomas and Brown in their efforts to make the railroad effective wandered in a maze of difficulties testing out such absurd and impossible ideas as cars propelled by sails and cars operated by horse treadmills.By May, 1830, however, cars on rails, running by "brigades" and drawn by horses, were in operation in America.It was only in this year that in England locomotives were used with any marked success on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad; yet in August of this year Peter Cooper's engine, Tom Thumb, built in Baltimore in 1829, traversed the twelve miles between that city and Ellicott's Mills in seventy-two minutes.Steel springs came in 1832, together with car wheels of cylindrical and conical section which made it easier to turn curves.