the first instance of the regular
employment of locomotive power for commercial purposes.

The Messrs. Chapman, of Newcastle, in 1812, endeavoured to overcome the
same fictitious difficulty of the want of adhesion between the wheel and
the rail, by patenting a locomotive to work along the road by means of a
chain stretched from one end of it to the other. This chain was passed
once round a grooved barrel-wheel under the centre of the engine: so
that, when the wheel turned, the locomotive, as it were, dragged itself
along the railway. An engine, constructed after this plan, was tried on
the Heaton Railway, near Newcastle; but it was so clumsy in its action,
there was so great a loss of power by friction, and it was found to be so
expensive and difficult to keep in repair, that it was soon abandoned.
Another remarkable expedient was adopted by Mr. Brunton, of the Butterley
Works, Derbyshire, who, in 1813, patented his Mechanical Traveller, to go
_upon legs_ working alternately like those of a horse. {73} But this
engine never got beyond the experimental state, for, at its very first
trial, the driver, to make sure of a good start, overloaded the
safety-valve, when the boiler burst and killed a number of the
bystanders, wounding many more. These, and other contrivances with the
same object, projected about the same time, show that invention was
actively at work, and that many minds were anxiously labouring to solve
the important problem of locomotive traction upon railways.

But the difficulties contended with by these early inventors, and the
step-by-step progress which they made, will probably be best illustrated
by the experiments conducted by Mr. Blackett, of Wylam, which are all the
more worthy of notice, as the persevering efforts of this gentleman in a
great measure paved the way for the labours of George Stephenson, who,
shortly after, took up the question of steam locomotion, and brought it
to a successful issue.

The Wylam waggon-way is one of the oldest in the north of England. Down
to the year 1807 it was formed of wooden spars or rails, laid down
between the colliery at Wylam--where old Robert Stephenson had
worked--and the village of Lemington, some four miles down the Tyne,
where the coals were loaded into keels or barges, and floated down past
Newcastle, to be shipped for London. Each chaldron-waggon had a man in
charge of it, and was originally drawn by one horse. The rate at which
the waggons we