A．industrial workersB．George StephensonC．the minersD．th……
TEXT D
The coming of the railways
in the 1830s transformed society and economic life by providing, for first time,
mass transport for passengers and goods. One man, George Stephenson, is
sometimes called the "father of the railways" although he did not invent either
the locomotive or the rails. The basic idea of a "railway" was an old one,
mainly used in mines, in the sixteenth century, miners found it was easier to
push their loads in a truck with wooden wheels over planks than to push it
through mud and over rocks. Later they developed plateways, which were long
pieces of iron fixed to the ground to channel the wheels along, in place of the
wooden planks.
So these were the early rails, but what about the
locomotives Locomotive is short for locomotive engine, which means a
self-propeled engine. Steam engines were well--known in mines and factories by
the early nineteenth century, and some people had the idea of putting them on
wheels as a substitute for human and horse power in pulling loads.
The first such locomotive was built by an English man called Richard
Trevithick in the year 1804. His engine worked but there were serious technical
problems. The locomotives were very heavy, for example and kept breaking the
track. At this stage, they didn’t even offer any economic advantage. So
locomotives didn’t really catch on then.
One early enthusiast,
though, was George Stephenson, who had been doing various mechanical and
engineering jobs at coal mines since he was a boy. He didn’t have much formal
education, but he was good at fixing things, from shoes to clocks to steam
engines. He had devised on ingenious safety lamp for the mines, one that
wouldn’t cause explosions underground.
The engines at the mines
were mostly stationary fixed machines for pumping water or for winding or
hauling loads by cables. But George Stephenson also built a number of
experimental locomotives. That’s how he came to be involved, in september 1825,
with the opening of an innovative railway line in northern England. Until then,
the only railways had been small, private lines carrying coal or metal ores from
mines to the nearest river or canal. The Stockton and Darlington railway was
different. It was a public railway and for this new railway, George Stephenson
desired a locomotive called "locomotion" which was used to haul passengers from
the first day.
The idea of carrying passengers as well as
freight was born and soon turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be a phenomenal
success. The booming Industrial Revolution also meant a growing demand for goods
trans- port, which the railways were able to meet. But although railways were
now becoming established, locomotives weren’t. They still faced competition from
both horsepower and stationary winding engines. This is really where George
Stephenson crones in.
The next big railway project was a fifty -
kilometre line to link Liverpool and Manchester, again in northern England. The
directions couldn’t decide which method of haulage they should go for: On the
whole they favoured winding engines, stationed every two or three kilometres
along the track. But Stephenson, who was on the board of directors, argued
doggedly in favor of locomotives, and in the end they agreed to offer a prize to
see if anyone could build one good enough to do the job. Stephenson entered the
contest, of course—he was competitive by nature anyway — with locomotive built
by his son, Robert George him- self was too busy surveying the railway line but
Robert was also an excellent engineer and he designed a magnificent engine
called the Rocket, the true ancestor of the modern steam locomotive.
The most important feature of the Rocket was its multi - tube boiler,
instead of just one wide tube carrying hot air from the furnace through the
water of the boiler, heating it into steam, the Rocket had twenty five little
tubes, which gave it a much greater surface area in contact with the water, so
it made more steam, much faster. It also had a blast pipe. In other words,
exhaust steam was sent up the chimney in a rapid blast which pulled a draught of
air across the furnace, making it burn better. All this made the locomotive more
powerful. On the last van of the trials, George opened the throttle up and the
Rocket achieved an amazing speed of thirty miles an hour. This really proved the
feasibility of using locomotives to haul trains on rail-ways.
In a true sense, plateways are the earliest and most primitive railways invented by ______.
A．industrial workers
B．George Stephenson
C．the miners
D．the miner’s work
