Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/753

How European History merged into World History 571 dragged by means of horses and oxen or carried in slow canal boats is being transported in long trains of capacious cars, each of which holds as much as fifteen or twenty large wagons. The story of the locomotive, like that of the spinning machine or steam engine, is the history of many experiments and their final combination by a successful inventor, George Stephenson. In 1814 Stephenson built a small locomo- tive, known as Puffing Billy, which was used at the mines, and in 1825, with the author- ization of Parliament, he opened between Stockton and Darling- ton, in the northern part of England, a line for the convey- ance of passengers and freight. About this time a road was being projected between Liverpool and Manchester, and in an open com- petition, in which five locomotives were entered, Stephenson's Rocket was chosen for the new railroad, which was formally opened in 1830. This famous engine weighed about seven tons and ran at an average speed of thirteen miles an hour a small affair when compared with the giant locomotive of our day, weighing a hundred tons and running fifty miles an hour. Within fifteen years trains were running regularly between Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, and at the close of the century Great Britain had twenty-two thousand miles of railway carrying over a billion passengers annually. 1037. Spread of Railways. The first railway was opened in France in 1828 and the first in Germany in 1835, but the develop- ment of the system was greatly hindered by the territorial divi- sions which then existed. Europe was before the World War A LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY GEORGE STEPHENSON