I have digressed. And without apology. We were recounting the actual devices for the improvement of the steam locomotive: the superheater, the brick arch, the feed-water heater, the booster. None of these--in their essentials, at least--are patented devices. Any good locomotive builder can use them freely. He only waits the word of the purchaser of the locomotive. Neither is there any patented monopoly in the mechanical stoker. Two or three very good types already are on the market and if you wonder at their efficacy may I again suggest that some good warm summer's day you go down into your own cellar and shovel seventeen tons of coal across it--from one side to the other--in four or five hours. Sleep overnight--if you wish to complete the illusion, preferably on a rough, hard bed--and the next day shovel all the coal back again, in four or five hours. Then ask yourself, if you were a locomotive fireman would you feel that there was any real need for a mechanical stoker. There is no monopoly, either, in the plans for substituting more and more light reciprocating locomotive parts of alloy-steel in place of the old-fashioned heavy cumbersome ones that hold their places, almost through tradition alone. Our American locomotive to-day is far too heavy. The automotive industry--the group of men who in real cooperation have perfected almost every detail of the American motor-car--again has pointed the way. If a balanced crank-shaft is valuable to a rubber-tired locomotive upon a concrete highway, should a device of similar ingenuity and value be accounted an impossibility upon the flange-wheeled one of the steel highway? The possibilities of intensive development of the steam locomotive upon these lines alone seemingly are almost infinite. If Henry Ford, with not only the skill and experience of his own marvelously ingenious mechanical mind, but the expert staff that he has always at his elbow, can succeed in bettering the American steam locomotive radically, I think that the American public will be tempted to call him blessed indeed. If Mr. Ford can only succeed in putting better bearings under our railroad-cars his name should be accounted as blessed in our railroad tradition. The axle-bearing of the average railroad-car in this country--particularly the freight rolling-stock--has neither been improved nor changed in more than half a century. It is virtually the same now as it was in 1860--a swabbing of cotton-waste and grease set in a box upon the axle-end, a device forever becoming dry and hot and blazing forth into flame. Contrast such an archaic thing with the axle-bearing of the modern motor-car or motor-truck. Ball-bearings, or, in the case of heavier vehicles, roller-bearings. A Detroit specialty concern installed these on a big Michigan Central box-car not many months ago, and two men pushed the car down a siding with no vast effort. If these things can be done and have been done, why are they not being done to-day?