That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane, and the performance of the _George Washington_ has not been attempted in all these years save in the case of Latrobe's temporary line at Kingwood Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment, pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170 others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony. William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for the growing nation across the Atlantic. Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the beginning of his life. He lived long enough to lay the foundation of one of the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm that has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and kept it alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin's first locomotive was built in 1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad; and that it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed twenty years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built two years later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg Company. After that his works were regularly established, their head to give his patience and untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive. The history of Baldwin locomotives is, in an important sense, the history of the industry in the United States. It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the _Governor Paine_ for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in 1848, and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a pair of driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back of the fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin must have given full value, for it is related that the engine could be started from a state of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ordered three of the same sort, and one of these once hauled a special train carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty miles an hour. In weight, the locomotive was steadily increasing. In the beginning, these engines weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late forties engines of twenty-five tons each were being built for the Reading Road, and these were regarded as monsters.