By 1863, he had produced his first two models, the Pioneer and the Springfield, named for the Illinois hometown of then-President Abraham Lincoln. George Pullman, who had made a name for himself during the 1850s as a self-trained engineer and building mover in Chicago, began tinkering with the idea of a comfortable railroad “sleeping car” after a particularly uncomfortable train ride in upstate New York. ![]() Abraham Lincoln’s assassination helped publicize train travel. During his infamous “March” through Georgia and the Carolinas, his men destroyed thousands of miles of Confederate rails, leaving heaps of heated, twisted iron that southerners wearily referred to as “Sherman’s neckties.” 4. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman provided particularly adept at the art of railroad sabotage. to Georgia (in just 11 days) to fortify Union forces-the longest and fastest troop movement of the 19th century.Ĭontrol of the railroad in a region was crucial to military success, and railroads were often targets for military attacks aimed at cutting off the enemy from its supplies. ![]() One of the most significant uses of trains came after the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was able to send 20,000 badly needed replacement troops more than 1,200 miles from Washington, D.C. Throughout the war, railroads enabled the quick transport of large numbers of soldiers and heavy artillery over long distances. Trains helped the North win the American Civil War. The B&O became one of the most successful railways in the United States, and Cooper (with his newly minted fortune) went on to a career as an investor and philanthropist, donating the money for New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. However, B&O executives, impressed with the massive power and speed Cooper’s engine had proven capable of, made the decision to convert their fledgling railroad to steam. The steam engine quickly roared into the lead, but when a belt broke loose it was forced to retire, and the horse crossed the finish line first. On August 28, 1830, Cooper’s engine, which he called the “Tom Thumb,” was undergoing testing on B&O tracks near Baltimore when a horse-drawn train pulled up alongside it and challenged Cooper (and “Tom Thumb”) to a race. Enter industrialist Peter Cooper: Cooper, who not coincidentally owned extensive land holdings over the proposed route of the railroad (the value of which would grow dramatically if the railroad succeeded), offered to design and build just such an engine. However, the company struggled to produce a steam engine capable of traveling over rough and uneven terrain, instead relying on horse-drawn trains. company granted a charter for transporting both passengers and freight. In 1827, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became the first U.S. America’s first steam locomotive lost a race to a horse. The sales ploy worked-we’re still using the term “horsepower” today-and his engines soon became the industry standard, leading directly to the invention of the first steam locomotive in 1804. He calculated how much power a single horse working in a mill could produce over a period of time (though many scientists now believe his estimates were far too high), a figure that he dubbed “horsepower.” Using this unit of measurement, he then came up with a figure that indicated how many horses just one of his engines could replace. Watt’s innovation was to add a separate condenser, greatly improving the engine’s efficiency.Ī savvy salesman, Watt knew that he needed a way to market his new product. Newcomen’s design required constant cooling down and re-heating, wasting vast amounts of energy. In the 1760s, the Scottish inventor began tinkering with an earlier version of the engine designed by Thomas Newcomen. James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine, but he did create the world’s first modern one and developed the means of measuring its power. ![]() The term 'horsepower' originated as a marketing tool.
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