Triumphs of the Republic in Practical Science

History, in the school-books of our forefathers, was mainly the chronicles of kings and warriors, statesmen, and the militant political factions they played for power. The history of the grander and more beneficent conquests of our day and the days to come is fitly written with the pen, and not the sword. The constructive and wholly progressive achievements of the great era which is marked by the dividing line between the centuries, happily make up the most glorious part of our national history during the later years. The following review of our brilliant contribution to scientific progress is taken from "Achievements of the Nineteenth Century," by William Matthews Handy.

WONDERFUL has been the part that the United States has taken in the multitude of astonishing achievements of the nineteenth century, - always abreast of the times, often leading. Yet in 1800 the Republic was less than twenty-five years old, so that her greatness and eminence of themselves are a growth of a century. In 1800 a country with only 5,308,483 inhabitants, hugging the seacoast, the United States has grown to an immense area and to a population of over 76,000,000. Struggling during the period with grave domestic problems, many of them entirely new, learning, growing, building, organizing, - to-day the United States leads the world in wealth, mining, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, transportation, education, and almost every field of endeavor. Her own development chiefly an achievement of a century, she has led in making the nineteenth century the age of greatest achievement.

While the period between 1825 and 1830 was pregnant with railway movements, it can scarcely be said that any railway was successfully operated in the Americas before 1830, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened its first section of fifteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicotts Mills. The first genuine locomotive in use in the United States was the "Stourbridge Lion," which made its trial trip several months before the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio road, on a railway connecting the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania with the Delaware and Hudson Canal. From 1830 to 1835 many lines were projected, and at the end of 1835 there were over a thousand miles of railway in use in the United States.

Necessity was the mother of invention; the money which Great Britain lavished on deep cuts and expensive tunnels was not forthcoming in the young republic, so the engineers of the United States put their wits to work and devised flexible locomotives which will round any curve, and ascend steep grades without difficulty. The chief and most important of these inventions is the swivel truck, which, placed under the front of the car, enables the driver to make a sharp turn with perfect safety. The American locomotive is exported in larger quantities every year. The first street railway was laid in New York in 1831, the first cable car was used in San Francisco in 1873. In 1851 an electric locomotive was tested on the Baltimore and Washington line, which ran nineteen miles in an hour, but the trolley did not become commercially successful until 1893. In other modes of locomotion, as those of the bicycle and horseless carriages, American ingenuity has kept ahead of foreign competition.

Robert Fulton built the first practicable steamboat, the Clermont, in 1807. In order of construction it was the sixteenth, but it was the first to be used permanently on the Hudson River. Two similar boats ran regularly within a year between New York and Albany, taking thirty-two hours each way. The first steamboat in England did not appear until 1812. At Pittsburg in 1811 the first boat for Western rivers was built, and she made the trip to New Orleans. Great enthusiasm was aroused when, with the construction of the Enterprise in 1815, St. Louis was reached in twenty-five days from New Orleans.

The first steamer to cross the Atlantic was an American-built ship, the Savannah. The vessel had been built in New York as a sailing-ship. She was of 350 tons' burden, clipper-built, full-rigged, and propelled by one inclined, direct-acting, low-pressure engine, similar to those now in use. She had paddle-wheels that could be taken out and put on deck. The Savannah steamed to the city in whose honor she was named, and from there started for Liverpool May 24, 1819, making the voyage in twenty-five days, being under steam eighteen days. She used pitch-pine as fuel, the use of coal in American steamers not having been introduced at that day. From Liverpool she went to St. Petersburg. For some years she ran between Savannah and New York, and finally ran aground in a storm off Long Island, and went to pieces.

England's first vessels to make regular trips across the ocean, were the ships, Sirius and Great Western, in 1838, each averaging seven and a half knots an hour. It was not until 1847 that the first American steamer, the United States, was built expressly for the transatlantic trade, making the voyage in thirteen days. The Britannia, owned by Samuel Cunard, had been running between Liverpool and Boston since 1840, a fourteen-day trip. It is needless to speak of the wonderful achievements in ship-building and sailing in recent years. Submarine navigation is the latest development of American inventiveness and daring.