Scott Trostel 150 pages softcover
Those Amazing Railway Patents Volume 1 is about the inventive spirit that propelled railroads to the forefront of the industrial revolution in the United States. It was the need to solve everyday problems that caused a lot of ordinary people to accept the challenges and find unique ways to overcome problems, find new ways of doing something, improve safety and performance and make things more efficient and introduce new technologies. The inventors were "thinking outside of the box". Not always an easy process and sometimes against great adversity because it challenged traditionally accepted ways and the status quo.
It was problems like the many injuries suffered by the railroad trainmen because they had to use the dangerous link and pin coupler, that prompted Eli Janny, a clerk in a mercantile store to sit down with his pocket knife and carve out of wood his idea for a newer and safer coupler. It became the standard for the knuckle coupler, used by every railroad for over 100 years.
a 22 year old George Westinghouse conceived the idea of a simple device that an engineer could control from the cab of a locomotive to slow and stop all the cars of a train simultaneously that prompted him to invent the air brake.
Ephram Shay struggled with ways to transport logs from the woods in non-traditional ways, and thus came his Shay geared locomotive.
Charles J. Van DePoele changed how people traveled with is group of street railway inventions. Rudolf Diesel invented a new kind of machine to do work in place of the steam engine and ultimately several locomotive builders married the diesel to a generator and invented a new kind of railroad locomotive.
Steel replaced iron and wood in railroad car construction, electric replaced kerosene as a light source for the railroad and these are the things that changed how a complex industry exists and works.
This book is a sampling of the American inventive genius in illustrated format.
