Mr. Blackett was a friend of Richard Trevithick; and among the various inventors and improvers of the locomotive engine Richard Trevithick, a tin-miner in Cornwall, must have a high place. Trevithick was a pupil of Murdock, who was assistant of James Watt. Murdock had made a model successfully of a locomotive engine at Redruth. Others also had attempted the same thing. Savery had suggested something of the kind; Cugnot, a French engineer, built one in Paris about 1763; Oliver Evans, an American, made a steam carriage in 1772; William Symington, who did so much for the steamboat, constructed a model of one in 1784. So that many minds had been at work on the problem. But Richard Trevithick was really the first Englishman who used a steam-engine on a railway. He had not much money and he persuaded his cousin, Andrew Vivian, to join him in the enterprise. In 1802 they took out a patent for a steam-engine to propel carriages. But before this he had made a locomotive to travel along roads, and on Christmas Eve, 1801, the wonderful sight could have been seen of this machine carrying passengers for the first time. It is indeed believed to have been the first occasion on which passengers were conveyed by the agency of steam—the pioneer indeed of a mighty traffic. The machine was taken to London and exhibited in certain streets, and at length, in 1808, it was shown on ground where now, curiously enough, the Euston Station of the London and North-Western Railway stands. Did any prevision of the extraordinary success of the locomotive flash across the engineer’s brain? Before the infant century had run its course what wonderful developments of the strange new machine were to be seen on that very spot! Much interest was aroused by the exhibition of this machine, and Sir Humphrey Davy, a fellow Cornishman, is reported to have written to a friend—“I shall soon hope to hear that the roads of England are the haunts of Captain Trevithick’s dragons—a characteristic name.” His letter tends to show that the idea then was that the engine should run on the public roads, and not on a specially prepared track like a railway. Had not this idea been modified, and the principle of a railroad adopted, it is hardly too much to say that the extraordinary development of the locomotive would not have followed. Trevithick’s first engine appears to have burst. At all events, in the year 1803 or 1804, he built, and began to run, a locomotive on a horse tramway in South Wales. It appears that he had been employed to build a forge-engine here, and thus the opportunity was presented for the trial of a machine to haul along minerals. This, it is believed, was the first railway locomotive, and its builder was Richard Trevithick.