You know this was only talk then; we never thought what
would come of it; but very curious it all was."
And here Mr. Joslyn went into a long mathematical
talk, with which I will not harass the reader, perfectly
sure, from other experiments which I have tried with
other readers, that this reader would skip it all if
it were written down. Stated very briefly, it amounted
to this: In the old-fashioned experiments of those days,
a cannon-ball travelled four thousand and one hundred
feet in nine seconds. Now, Joslyn was convinced, like
every other engineman I ever talked to, that on a steep
down-grade he could drive a train at the rate of a
hundred miles an hour. This is thirteen hundred and
fourteen feet in nine seconds,--almost exactly one-third
of the cannon-ball's velocity. At those rates, if the
valley at Chamoguin were really but five-eighths of a
mile wide, the cannon-ball would cross it in seven or
eight seconds, and the train in about twenty-three
seconds. Both Todhunter and Joslyn were good enough
mechanics and machinists to know that the rate for
thirty-three hundred feet, the width of the valley, was
not quite the same as that for four thousand feet; for
which, in their book, they had the calculations and
formulas; but they also knew that the difference was to
their advantage, or the advantage of the bold experiment
which had occurred to both of them when Todhunter had
made on the tender his very critical suggestion.
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