e shops were easily the largest and bestequipped in the Union when
in 1838 John Stevens died at the age of ninety. The four brothers, John
Cox, Robert Livingston, James Alexander, and Edwin Augustus, worked
harmoniously together. "No one ever heard of any quarrel or dissension
in the Stevens family. They were workmen themselves, and they were
superior to their subordinates because they were better engineers and
better men of business than any other folk who up to that time had
undertaken the business of transportation in the United States."*

* Abram S. Hewitt. Quoted in Iles, "Leading American
Inventors", p. 37.

The youngest of these brothers, Edwin Augustus Stevens, dying in 1868,
left a large part of his fortune to found the Stevens Institute of
Technology, afterwards erected at Hoboken not far from the old family
homestead on Castle Point. The mechanical star of the family, however,
was the second brother, Robert Livingston Stevens, whose many inventions
made for the great improvement of transportation both by land and water.
For a quarter of a century, from 1815 to 1840, he was the foremost
builder of steamboats in America, and under his hand the steamboat
increased amazingly in speed and efficiency. He made great contributions
to the railway. The first locomotives ran upon wooden stringers plated
with strap iron. A loose end--"a snakehead" it was called--sometimes
curled up and pierced through the floor of a car, causing a wreck. The
solid metal T-rail, now in universal use, was designed by Stevens
and was first used on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, of which he was
president and his brother Edwin treasurer and manager. The swivel truck
and the cow-catcher, the modern method of attaching rails to ties, the
vestibule car, and many improvements in the locomotive were also first
introduced on the Stevens road.

The Stevens brothers exerted their influence also on naval construction.
A double invention of Robert and Edwin, the forced draft, to augment
steam power and save coal, and the air-tight fireroom, which they
applied to their own vessels, was afterwards adopted by all navies.
Robert designed and projected an ironclad battleship, the first one
in the world. This vessel, called the Stevens Battery, was begun by
authority of the Government in 1842; but, owing to changes in the design
and inadequate appropriations by Congress, it was never launched. It lay
for many years in the basin at Hoboken an un