Watt paid practically no attention to the use of steam for purposes of transportation. In one of his patents he described a steam locomotive; but he offered little encouragement when his chief assistant, Murdoch, who was the inventor of gas lighting, made experiments with steam for locomotion. The notion then was to use a steam carriage on ordinary roads. Railroads had not been thought of. When the idea of using steam on railways began to take shape in the later days of Watt, he refused to encourage the plan. It is said that he even put a clause in a lease of his house, providing that no steam carriage should ever approach it under any pretext whatever.
Besides developing the steam engine, Watt made other inventions, including a press for copying letters. He also probably discovered the chemical composition of water. He died at Heathfield, England, on the nineteenth of August, 1819.
It is denied many men to see the magnitude of their achievements. Moses died on Pisgah, in sight of the "Promised Land," toward which for forty years he had led the children of Israel through the wilderness. Wolfe gave up his life on the plains of Quebec just as the first shouts of the routed French greeted his ears. Columbus was sent home in chains from the America he had discovered, not dreaming he had given to civilization another world. Lincoln's eyes were closed forever at the very dawn of peace, after he had watched in patience through the long and fearful night of the Civil War. It never appeared to James Watt that the idea which flashed into his mind that Sunday afternoon while he was walking in the streets of Glasgow, would transform human life; that like a mighty multiplier it would increase the product of man's power and give him dominion, not over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, but over tide and wind, space and time.
Victor Hugo calls locomotives "these giant draft horses of civilization." But man never harnessed these wonderful iron animals until the time of George Stephenson, less than a hundred years ago.
Stephenson was born at Wylam, near Newcastle, England, June 9, 1781. His father was a fireman of a coal-mine engine at that place. In boyhood George was a cowherd, but he spent his spare time making clay models of engines and other objects of a mechanical nature. When he was fourteen years old, he became assistant to his father in firing the engine at the colliery, and three years later he was advanced to engine driving. At this time he could not even read; but, stimulated by a strong desire to know more of the engines made by Boulton and Watt, he began in his eighteenth year to attend a night school. He learned rapidly. During most of this time he studied various experiments with a view to making a successful steam locomotive.