La machine locomotive en France des origines au milieu du XIXe siècle by Jacques Payen

Abstract

534 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and, in cities and towns, the movement of goods depended on human and animal energy right up until 1914, when mechanization in the form of motor vans and lorries began to have an effect. From the standpoint of scholarly research, Transport in Victorian Britain constitutes a major contribution to the history of transporta­ tion in Britain. The authors’ conclusions are soundly based on a thorough analysis of recent research on many related subjects; they also point out aspects of transportation history not covered in the book for further examination. The inclusion of many tables, graphs, maps, figures, general statistics, and a complete bibliography, together with the authoritative summaries, will render the book a valuable resource for students of economics, geography, and transport history. But the crisp and highly readable writing style of the authors will extend the book’s appeal beyond these academic specialists to others with more pedestrian interests in the history of British transportation. James T. Angus Dr. Angus is a professor of educational administration in the School of Education, Lakehead University. He is the author ofA Respectable Ditch: A History ofthe Trent-Severn Waterway 1833-1920 (Montreal, 1988). La machine locomotive en France des origines au milieu du XIX' siècle. By Jacques Pâyen. Lyon and Paris: Presses Universitaires de Lyon and Éditions du CNRS, 1988. Pp. 262; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. F 160.00 (paper). In describing the earliest locomotives used in France, this book recounts the transfer of technology from the United Kingdom but is not detailed enough to show the individual contribution of the French mind. It reveals that in 1846 France had as many British-built as French-built engines in service, but four years later there were five times more French than British. The book begins with five useful chronologies, each dealing with the creation of what later became one of the great railways that existed before the SNCF. Traffic growth is implied in tables of locomotive stock additions, year by year. This is followed by a fair and well-documented account of the origins of the multi-firetube boiler, developed independently by Robert Stephenson and Marc Seguin, demonstrating that Seguin’s locomotive, shorn of its blowing fans and provided with a blast pipe, returned a similar boiler efficiency to that obtained with the Rocket. The main part of the book divides the French locomotives of the period into four generations, which at least has the advantage of conveniently organizing the text and very full references (the book’s great virtue), as well as the plentiful illustrations. This part occupies TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 535 the equivalent of some sixty pages of text and notes, plus 111 illustrations: not a great length, but the information is not available in any other single book and is here presented concisely. This is a book for the technically informed historian to use and for the historically minded engineer to enjoy. It is full of things one had not thought about, such as that the Strasbourg-Bâle line was the first international main-line railway, or that the French revolution of 1830 explains why the Planet type did not reach France in any quantity; but it scarcely touches on the finer details of progress in design that rapidly turned the locomotive into a reliable machine. Jacques Payen draws heavily on Warren’s A Century of Locomotive Building by Robert Stephenson and Co., but Ahrons’s The British Steam Locomotive, 1825— 1925, a superior source dealing with other makers, is nowhere referred to. Neither, surprisingly, does the bibliography mention Jahn’s Die Dampflokomotive in entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Darstellung ihres Gesamtaufbaues, published in 1924. These two are probably the most meticulously researched locomotive histories that have appeared, but one has to read them to realize this. Alongside Ahrons, Jahn, and Warren, this is a slighter work—a monograph, not a treatise. Written by a distinguished historical researcher with help from a technical journalist and a theoretical physicist, it shows signs of remoteness from engineering reality. No engineer would describe the “Buddicom” type as an evolved “Patentee”: it was an alternative, designed to avoid the faults of the “Patentee” by eliminating...