hat railway
improvement had almost reached its limits.

Many expedients had been tried with this object. One of the earliest was
that of hoisting sails upon the waggons, and driving them along the
waggon-way, as a ship is driven through the water by the wind. This
method seems to have been employed by Sir Humphrey Mackworth, an
ingenious coal-miner at Neath in Glamorganshire, about the end of the
seventeenth century.

After having been lost sight of for more than a century, the same plan of
impelling carriages was revived by Richard Lovell Edgworth, with the
addition of a portable railway, since revived also, in Boydell's patent.
But although Mr. Edgworth devoted himself to the subject for many years,
he failed in securing the adoption of his sailing carriage. It is indeed
quite clear that a power so uncertain as wind could never be relied on
for ordinary traffic, and Mr. Edgworth's project was consequently left to
repose in the limbo of the Patent Office, with thousands of other equally
useless though ingenious contrivances.

A much more favourite scheme was the application of steam power for the
purpose of carriage traction. Savery, the inventor of the working
steam-engine, was the first to propose its employment to propel vehicles
along the common roads; and in 1759 Dr. Robison, then a young man
studying at Glasgow College, threw out the same idea to his friend James
Watt; but the scheme was not matured.

[Picture: Cugnot's Engine]

The first locomotive steam-carriage was built at Paris by the French
engineer Cugnot, a native of Lorraine. It is said to have been invented
for the purpose of dragging cannon into the field independent of horses.
The original model of this machine was made in 1763. Count Saxe was so
much pleased with it, that on his recommendation a full-sized engine was
constructed at the cost of the French monarch; and in 1769 it was tried
in the presence of the Duc de Choiseul, Minister of War, General
Gribeauval, and other officers. At one of the experiments it ran with
such force as to knock down a wall in its way. But the new vehicle,
loaded with four persons, could not travel faster than two and a half
miles an hour. The boiler was insufficient in size, and it could only
work for about fifteen minutes; after which it was necessary to wait
until the steam had again risen to a sufficient pressure. To remedy this
defect, Cugnot constructed a new machine in 1770,