. Book of the Royal blue . ized locomotive, he isnone the less entitled to the renown ofbeing the father of the American loco-motive. He began building his modelon the site of the present Mount Clareworkshops in Baltimore, in 1^29, andmade several trial trips with it beforethe close of that year. It was a verycrude machine, judged by the presentstandard, having an upright boiler witha single cylinder of 3^4 inches diameterand a stroke of 14b inches. AldermanCooper, as he was then always called,could get no tubes for his boiler in thiscountry, so that he was forced to use fiveor six gun barrels
. Book of the Royal blue . ized locomotive, he isnone the less entitled to the renown ofbeing the father of the American loco-motive. He began building his modelon the site of the present Mount Clareworkshops in Baltimore, in 1^29, andmade several trial trips with it beforethe close of that year. It was a verycrude machine, judged by the presentstandard, having an upright boiler witha single cylinder of 3^4 inches diameterand a stroke of 14b inches. AldermanCooper, as he was then always called,could get no tubes for his boiler in thiscountry, so that he was forced to use fiveor six gun barrels for this purpose. In-stead of using the exhaust steam fromthe cylinder to produce a draught for thefire, as in all modern locomotives, placed a fan, revolved by a beltfrom one of the axles, in the funnel ofhis engine. The power was applied tothe other axle by means of a toothed wheel. The stren?;th nl tiie cuLjineSvas one horse power. ^ On Saturday, Au,L;ust , i-S^n, Peter Cooper and thirty-nine ntlur persons. had a grand excursion to Ellicotts Mills,thirteen miles distant, and back. Thegross weight of the train was three anda half tons, and the steepest gradienteighteen feet to the mile. Mr. Cooperacted as both engineer and fireman, us-ing his favorite anthracite coal. The out-bound trip was performed in an hourand twelve minutes, part of it being doneat the then extraordinary rate of eigh-teen miles an hour. Mr. H. S. Latrobe,one of the passengers, who was for manyyears afterward general counsel to theBaltimore & Ohio Railroad Company,remembered that when this speed wasreached several gentlemen pulled outtheir pencils and wrote connected sen-tences on slips of paper to prove that itwas possible at that gn^at velocity. On the homeward trip, on thisoccasion, the band slipped off the fanand the anthracite coal refused to burnfast enough to make steam. The conse-quence was that one of the Stockton &Stokes horse cars passed the locomotive,in spite of the frantic effo
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