Some time before his death, in 1819, while resting from labor in his old age, James Watt, when asked to allow his fellow-citizens to honor him with a seat in Parliament, refused, saying that he had given employment to the better part of a million of men, and had earned the right to rest from work. To how many millions of men since then has his invention given employment! In a life of Watt published many years since I find a statement that the steam-power of the world was equal to that of 400,000,000 men, and this amount has probably been doubled since the statement was made. And yet the world has even now but just begun to reap the fruits of this invention. Each year witnesses the extension of its use.
About seventy years ago Robert Fulton, one of the greatest mechanical geniuses of this country, applied the steam-engine to a boat and made the first trial of a ship moved by the power of heat in a trip from New York to Albany. Now every ocean is plowed by the steamship, and there is hardly a navigable river on the face of the globe that has not become a highway for it. A few years later, in 1825, George Stephenson invented the locomotive and gave to man the railroad, and now, sixty years later, we have more than 128,000 miles of railroad in operation in this country alone.
I believe that no other Englishman has done so much for his fellow-men, so much to change the social and economical conditions of society, as George Stephenson.
Would you like to know how much the steam-engine has increased the power of man in Massachusetts? I can tell you what the locomotive has done. In 1878 the railroad companies of this State had 1,030 locomotives. The proportion due to the amount of their track in this State was 757, and the work they did was equal to what 913,545 horses could do on good common roads, and was equivalent to the labor of 5,481,270 laboring-men, or to that of a population of nearly 20,000,000.
Now, in 1875, Massachusetts had only about 130,000 horses, and her population was a little more than a million and a half.
But this was not all that Massachusetts owed to the steam-engine. She employs it largely in steam-vessels owned in the State or coming from abroad. What the whole amount of work done by these vessels was equal to I do not know, but it was large.
She also employed steam-and water-power in her manufactures equal to that of 1,912,488 men. The work done by the steam-and water-power was equal to what could have been done by hand-power by a population of 7,400,000.
I think there are more than 20,000 locomotives in the United States. There would be more than that if all the roads were as well provided with locomotives as the roads in Massachusetts are.
Assuming that to be the number, and that they do as much work as they do here, and the work is equal to that of 25,000,000 horses,
