The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated: With an historical sketch of its invention and progressive improvement; its applications to navigation and railways; with plain axioms for railway speculatorsLardner, Dionysius
History
The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated: With an historical sketch of its invention and progressive improvement; its applications to navigation and railways; with plain axioms for railway speculators
Lardner, Dionysius
Steam-engines -- Early works to 1850
The reduction in the cost of transport of manufactured articles, by
lowering their price in the market, will stimulate their consumption.
This observation applies of course not only to home but to foreign
markets. In the latter we already in many branches of manufacture
command a monopoly. The reduced price which we shall attain by
cheapness and facility of transport will still further extend and
increase our advantages. The necessary consequence will be, an
increased demand for manufacturing population; and this increased
population again reacting on the agricultural interests, will form an
increased market for that species of produce. So interwoven and
complicated are the fibres which form the texture of the highly
civilized and artificial community in which we live, that an effect
produced on any one point is instantly transmitted to the most remote
and apparently unconnected parts of the system.
The two advantages of increased cheapness and speed, besides extending
the amount of existing traffic, call into existence new objects of
commercial intercourse. For the same reason that the reduced cost of
transport, as we have shown, calls new soils into cultivation, it also
calls into existence new markets for manufactured and agricultural
produce. The great speed of transit which has been proved to be
practicable, must open a commerce between distant points in various
articles, the nature of which does not permit them to be preserved so
as to be fit for use beyond a certain time. Such are, for example,
many species of vegetable and animal food, which at present are
confined to markets at a very limited distance from the grower or
feeder. The truth of this observation is manifested by the effects
which have followed the intercourse by steam on the Irish Channel. The
western towns of England have become markets for a prodigious quantity
of Irish produce, which it had been previously impossible to export.
If animal food be transported alive from the grower to the consumer,
the distance of the market is limited by the power of the animal to
travel, and the cost of its support on the road. It is only particular
species of cattle which bear to be carried to market on common roads
and by horse carriages. But the peculiar nature of a railway, the
magnitude and weight of the loads which may be transported on it, and
the prodigious speed which may be attained, render the transport of
cattle, of every species, to almost any distance, both easy and cheap.
In process of time, when the railway system becomes extended, the
metropolis and populous towns will therefore become markets, not as at
present to districts within limited distances of them, but to the
whole country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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