The rapid increase in the coal-trade of the Tyne about the beginning of the present century had the effect of stimulating the ingenuity of mechanics, and encouraging them to devise improved methods of transporting the coal from the pits to the shipping places. From our introductory chapter, it will have been observed that the improvements which had thus far been effected were confined almost entirely to the road. The railway waggons still continued to be drawn by horses. By improving and flattening the tramway, considerable economy in horse-power had indeed been secured; but unless some more effective method of mechanical traction could be devised, it was clear that railway improvement had almost reached its limits. Many expedients had been tried with this object. One of the earliest was that of hoisting sails upon the waggons, and driving them along the waggon-way, as a ship is driven through the water by the wind. This method seems to have been employed by Sir Humphrey Mackworth, an ingenious coal-miner at Neath in Glamorganshire, about the end of the seventeenth century. After having been lost sight of for more than a century, the same plan of impelling carriages was revived by Richard Lovell Edgworth, with the addition of a portable railway, since revived also, in Boydell’s patent. But although Mr. Edgworth devoted himself to the subject for many years, he failed in securing the adoption of his sailing carriage. It is indeed quite clear that a power so uncertain as wind could never be relied on for ordinary traffic, and Mr. Edgworth’s project was consequently left to repose in the limbo of the Patent Office, with thousands of other equally useless though ingenious contrivances. A much more favourite scheme was the application of steam power for the purpose of carriage traction. Savery, the inventor of the working steam-engine, was the first to propose its employment to propel vehicles along the common roads; and in 1759 Dr. Robison, then a young man studying at Glasgow College, threw out the same idea to his friend James Watt; but the scheme was not matured. [Picture: Cugnot’s Engine]