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It was Mr Pryce's watch; but the skipper Captain Rainhill was also on deck; and together the pair assiduously promenaded the poop, to and fro, pausing for a moment to listen and peer anxiously into the thickness to windward every time that they reached the break of the poop at one end of their walk, and the stern grating at the other.
Little more than half a century has elapsed since it startled the world by its performance at Rainhill, and yet it is not too much to say that the truth the whole truth, that is to say can never now be written.
"Mr Ferris, muster the watches at once port watch to the port side, and starboard watch to the starboard side and set them to work to clear away the boats for launching. Where is the chief steward?" "Here, sir," answered the individual in question, forcing his way through the excited crowd that surrounded the skipper. "Good!" ejaculated Rainhill.
Enough remains, however, to show very clearly what manner of engine this Rocket was. For the sake of comparison we reproduce an engraving of the Rocket of 1829. A glance will show that an astonishing transformation had taken place in the eleven months which had elapsed between the Rainhill trials and the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. We may indicate a few of the alterations.
Maudslay went to Berlin for the purpose of superintending the erection of machinery at the Royal Mint there. He intended to be absent from London for about a month; and he kindly permitted me to take my holiday during that period. I had been greatly interested by the descriptions in the newspapers of the locomotive competition at Rainhill, near Liverpool.
The helmsman was steering by compass, and not by the sails, since it was impossible to see anything above a dozen feet up from the deck; hence the ship was going along with everything a-rap full. Captain Rainhill was very far from being easy in his mind.
G. & R. Stephenson's direction. Mr. Phipps is quite silent about the history of the engine during the eleven months between the Rainhill trials and the opening of the railway. In this respect he is like every one else. This period is a perfect blank. It is assumed that from Rainhill the engine went back to Messrs.
The success of the Rainhill experiment, as judged by the public, may be inferred from the fact that the shares of the Company immediately rose ten per cent., and nothing more was heard of the proposed twenty-one fixed engines, engine-houses, ropes, etc. All this cumbersome apparatus was thenceforward effectually disposed of.
Rainhill was not to blame; he observed every possible precaution; the fault lay with the other fellow, who came blundering along through that dense fog at full speed. I take it he approached us so rapidly that he failed to hear our fog-horn until it was too late to avoid us. He ought, under the circumstances, to have been steaming dead slow.
His father had early implanted in him habits of mental activity, familiarized him with the laws of mechanics, and carefully trained and stimulated his inventive faculties, the first great fruits of which, as we have seen, were exhibited in the triumph of the “Rocket” at Rainhill. “I am fully conscious in my own mind,” said the son at a meeting of the Mechanical Engineers at Newcastle, in 1858, “how greatly my civil engineering has been regulated and influenced by the mechanical knowledge which I derived directly from my father; and the more my experience has advanced, the more convinced I have become that it is necessary to educate an engineer in the workshop.