The proposed railroad was to pass through Mr. Cooper's Canton property, which he had already begun to develop, "so that it should pay the taxes," by building upon it charcoal kilns, after a design of his own, with the purpose of turning the forest into charcoal, and, by means of this fuel, smelting the iron ore which the land contained. What was the immediate commercial outcome of this enterprise is not recorded. Mr. Cooper's characteristic recollection, more than sixty years later, was that, "with the exception of a dangerous explosion," which nearly cost him his life, the charcoal kilns were "a great success!" But the great value of the property was expected to be realized through the new railroad; and this expectation suffered a serious blow when the horse cars failed to pay expenses; the operation of the line was suspended; the directors lost faith in the enterprise; and many of the principal stockholders declared that they would rather lose the investment made so far than "throw good money after bad." For the hope that the new agency of steam might help them out was blighted by the news from England that Stephenson had said that steam could not be used as a motive power on a road having curves of less than 900 feet radius; and this road had, at Point of Rocks, a necessary curve with a radius of only 150 feet! The situation presented exactly the sort of challenge calculated to arouse the courage and ingenuity of Peter Cooper, besides appealing to another of his personal characteristics, namely, his undying and unalterable faith in his own ideas and conclusions, whether they had achieved recognition or not. He could lay aside a scheme which had not found immediate and successful application, and turn his attention, with undiminished vivacity, to something else; but he never owned to a real defeat. And now the problem presented at Baltimore seemed to him a providential call for his intervention. If the English engineers could not run their locomotives around sharp curves, it must be because they persisted in using the vicious crank, which he had already superseded by his (temporarily unappreciated) invention! And, with unshaken faith in that device, he informed the Baltimore and Ohio directors (to use the words in which, long afterwards, he told the story) that he thought he "could knock together a locomotive which would get a train around the Point of Rocks."