His neighbours jeered at him as they were to laugh a
hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his
funny flying machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country
an easy access to the broad rivers of the west and his countrymen
preferred to travel in flat-boats or go on foot. In the year
1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed himself by taking
poison.
But twenty years later, the ``Savannah,'' a steamer of 1850
tons and making six knots an hour, (the Mauretania goes just
four times as fast,) crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liverpool
in the record time of twenty-five days. Then there was
an end to the derision of the multitude and in their enthusiasm
the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man.
Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had
been building locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from
the mine-pit to smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his
famous ``travelling engine'' which reduced the price of coal by
almost seventy per cent and which made it possible to establish
the first regular passenger service between Manchester and
Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at the
unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years
later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour.
At the present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant
of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler
and Levassor of the eighties of the last century) can do better
than these early ``Puffing Billies.
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