. The Street railway journal . or invented before, and the fact isonly brought to light when the later and more energetic inventor makes them a success. Hence the old saying,There is no new thing under the sun. The successfulinventor is none the less worthy of his reward. Theidea of the girder rail, so-called, was not new in 1877,when the first rail was rolled, for we find on the PatentOffice records a patent granted to Sidney A. Beers, in1859, on An improvement in railroads for streets,which shows the girder rail almost exactly as we know itto-day. That any such rail was ever made or used att
. The Street railway journal . or invented before, and the fact isonly brought to light when the later and more energetic inventor makes them a success. Hence the old saying,There is no new thing under the sun. The successfulinventor is none the less worthy of his reward. Theidea of the girder rail, so-called, was not new in 1877,when the first rail was rolled, for we find on the PatentOffice records a patent granted to Sidney A. Beers, in1859, on An improvement in railroads for streets,which shows the girder rail almost exactly as we know itto-day. That any such rail was ever made or used atthat time does not appear, but the inventor certainly an-ticipated the idea of our girder raits. It is to a later and very energetic inventor—A. , of the Johnson Company—that we owe, in a largemeasure, the successful development of the modern gir-der rail. His first efforts in rolling such a rail were madein 1881, at Birmingham, Ala., afterward at Louisville,Ky., and later at Johnstown, Pa., where, in 1883, rails of. FIGS. 33 TO 38 —LATER GIRDER RAILS. this type were first rolled to any great extent. Theprincipal early sections of the Johnson Company areshown in Figs. 12 to 17 and 19 to 25. It was thought,and with good reason, that a very great advance hadbeen made in producing a rail which could be jointedby means of splice bars, and which, being in the formof a beam or girder, would have sufficient verticalstrength in itself. There was a demand, of course, for a grooved rail,and we see it supplied in Figs. 21 and 24. These have, inplace of the broad base, a bulb, providing only scantypurchase for the fishplates. These were called bulbsections, and were doubtless the result of efforts to de-crease the difficulties encountered in rolling the flangedsections. They were exceedingly unmechanical in de-sign, though not so much so as the Wharton or Jay- 5° bird rail (Figs. 29 and 30), which was devoid of eitherflanges or bulb. To get the strongest section there should
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, booksubjectstreetr, bookyear1884
