"Richard Trevithick's name may not be widely known today, but he was an important figure in the history of transportation. A mining engineer from Cornwall, Trevithick (1771-1833) built the first high pressure steam engine, and was able to put it to work on a railway known as the Penydarren because it moved along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, running 14 kilometers until reaching the canal wharf at Abercynon. The inaugural trip marked the first railway journey hauled by a locomotive, and it proceeded at a blistering 4 kilometers per hour. The year was 1804.
Consider, as René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research) does in a new paper, how Trevithick's accomplishment serves as a kind of bookend for 211 years of historical data on the growth in speed in human-made vehicles from the Penydarren to Voyager 1. The world's first production car was the Benz Velocipede (1894), whose top speed of 19 kilometers per hour far surpassed the Trevithick railway, but was put to shame by a Stanley Steamer racing car that reached a then incredible 204 kilometers per hour in 1903.
I mused about the nature of speed in a 2013 post called The Velocity of Thought, and Heller's new paper has me doing it again, though in entirely different directions. A few more waypoints and I'll explain what I mean. When the Wright Brothers took to the air in 1903, their Wright Flyer first flew at about 11 kilometers per hour, and we began to see how quickly aviation records could be superseded. A Sopwith Camel of World War I vintage could reach 181 kilometers per hour. By 1944, German test pilot Heini Dittmar was able to take a ME-163 rocket plane to 1130 km/h, a number that wouldn't be reached again for almost ten years…"
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