engines on the road, even with all the
short turns in it. I got up a small engine for that purpose, and put it
upon the road, and invited the stockholders to witness the experiment.
After a good deal of trouble and difficulty in accomplishing the work,
the stockholders came, and thirty-six men were taken into a car, and,
with six men on the locomotive, which carried its own fuel and water,
and having to go up hill eighteen feet to a mile, and turn all the short
turns around the points of rocks, we succeeded in making the thirteen
miles, on the first passage out, in one hour and twelve minutes, and we
returned from Ellicott's Mills to Baltimore in fifty-seven minutes. This
locomotive was built to demonstrate that cars could be drawn around
short curves, beyond anything believed at that time to be possible. The
success of this locomotive also answered the question of the possibility
of building railroads in a country scarce of capital, and with immense
stretches of very rough country to pass, in order to connect commercial
centres, without the deep cuts, the tunneling and leveling which short
curves might avoid. My contrivance saved this road from bankruptcy."

He still had his tract of Baltimore land upon his hands, which the check
to the prosperity of the city rendered for the time almost valueless; so
he determined to build ironworks upon it, and a rolling-mill. In his
zeal to acquire knowledge at first hand, he had a narrow escape from
destruction in Baltimore.

"In my efforts to make iron," he said, "I had to begin by burning the
wood growing upon the spot into charcoal, and in order to do that, I
erected large kilns, twenty-five feet in diameter, twelve feet high,
circular in form, hooped around with iron at the top, arched over so as
to make a tight place in which to put the wood, with single bricks left
out in different places in order to smother the fire out when the wood
was sufficiently burned. After having burned the coal in one of these
kilns perfectly, and believing the fire entirely smothered out, we
attempted to take the coal out of the kiln; but when we had got it about
half-way out, the coal itself took fire, and the men, after carrying
water some time to extinguish it, gave up in despair. I then went
myself to the door of the kiln to see if anything more could be done,
and just as I entered the door the gas itself took fire and enveloped me
in a sheet of flame. I had to run some ten feet to get out, and