About thirty years ago some clever German engineers first devised a plan for bringing steam from the boiler into the cylinders at such an intense heat that its full energy would not be immediately dissipated upon entering them and the steam partly turned into water. Technically this last is known as "saturated steam." The superheated steam idea was a good scheme and an apparent economy. Yet it was ten or a dozen years before it penetrated to this side of the Atlantic--to be exact, it was just twenty years ago. I sometimes wonder that it got across even so quickly as that. Our American railroad executives are not as a rule particularly alert to what is being done in transport in other lands. Europe has 14,000 applications of another locomotive improvement which is just coming to be used in our dear old U. S. A. So it goes. If a successful monorail installation were to be made in Patagonia, for instance, your average Yankee railroader would read of it in the columns of his beloved "Railway Age" and then smile patronizingly as he said:
"Very interesting, that. But of course it wouldn't do for us."
Our railroads, which long ago failed to work out any scientific scheme for the compensation of their employees, also failed to make an intelligent or organized study of the mechanical or scientific progress in their field. The United States army has long possessed its "staff"--the extremely competent group of men who, detached from the grind and drill of daily operation or detail, make constant and exhaustive study of every sort of military possibility from the complex mechanism of the newest guns from Krupp or Schneider or Armstrong overseas to the right kind of shoe for the marching soldier. The railroads of this country should have such a "staff." Very few of them have ever even attempted such a forward-looking device. They have been utterly hidebound by their traditions, and in consequence they have suffered.
Contrast this attitude with that of the automobile manufacturers of the country. In a situation that is nothing if not competitive, they have coöperated, almost from the beginning, and almost universally for the betterment of the machine itself. This plant or that, devising and perfecting a new kink for the improvement of the internal combustion or gasolene-engine, has thrown it into the common pot for the benefit of its competitors. I have known an automobile manufacturer to spend months on the perfection of a cylinder-block and then to drive it in mad haste over the Indianapolis Speedway, hour after hour, at more than a hundred miles an hour.