Steam.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 1, 3 January 1901, Page 18

Steam.

In travel, industry, and the social and domestic habits of the people, the steam-engine has probable produced a greater revolution than all the other combined agencies of science and invention. The first invention of an actual, working steam-engine was by that universal genius, the Marquis of Worcester, who suffered so much for his fidelity to the Catholic faith and to his hapless sovereign in the days of the Puritan regime in England. He received a patent from Parliament for his invention in 1663 — just 109 years before Watt took out his first patent for a similar method of generating energy. The invention that lav so long dormant has in latter days touched modern hf£ at almost every point. As the Turkish Vizir said to Kinglake in Eothen*, it is now * Whirr ! whirr ! all by wheels ! Whizz ! whizz ! all by steam ! ' No carriages were known in England till 1568 ; no stage-coaches till 1659. Within the memory of many persons still living — to use the words of Alfred Russel Wallace— 'the wagon for the poor, the stage-

coach for the middle classes, and the post-chaise for the wealthy, were the universal means of communication. 1 Bub the locomotive and the marine-engine have altered all all that. They did not merely create improved methods of travel. They revolutionised it. The old 'Puffing Billy* types of 1814 and later years were long age replaced by the fast express engine running at fifty to sixty miles an hour. The world's railways in 1897 were (according to Mulhall) 442,000 miles in length ; they carried 8,380,000,000 passengers in the twelve mouths ; their receipts were £631,000,000 ; and their expenditure £393,000,000. Little steam cockle-shells puffed and groaned on the Seine (Fulton's) in 1803 ; on the Clyde in 1812, and on the Thames in 1815. The Great Western that first crawled across the Atlantic in 1838 was the bold pioneer of great fleets of ocean steamers, torpedo boats, and fast cruisers that career over the surface of the water at the rate of from twenty to over thirty miles an hour. And the dead century drew the ends of the earth nearer together than they had ever been in previous history. The steam-engine and other inventions that were devised or brought into general use during the nineteenth century enormously increased the efficiency of human labor. One marked result of the amazing mechanical progress of the century was the cheapening and increase of output in every branch of manufacture. This, in turn, placed what were the comforts or luxuries of the early decades of the century within the reach of the masses. Apart from certain phases in the relations between labor and capital, the change, in this respect, has been both vast and, in the main, beneficent.