Sylvester Marsh

Sylvester Marsh (born September 30, 1803 in Compton , New Hampshire , USA , † December 30, 1884 in Concord ) was an American inventor and railway engineer.

Live and act

Marsh grew up as the ninth of eleven children in rural New Hampshire. At the age of 19, he walked to Boston , Massachusetts , where he traded in food, feed, meat, and started his own business in the market hall. In 1827 he went to Ohio and settled in Ashtabula on Lake Erie . In later years he moved to what is now the Midwestern United States and was successful in trading and exporting grain, especially corn. At the same time, he invented various methods to dry maize using steam engines, thus making it more suitable for transport, and secured appropriate patents for his processes and machines.

Marsh went back to New England as a wealthy man in the mid-1850s , where he devoted himself to the tourism development of his homeland by building railroads and building hotels and other infrastructure.

With the support of trained engineers, Marsh designed the world's first cogwheel railway in which steam locomotives use a cogwheel to negotiate inclines on a third rail in the middle of the tracks . He received US patents for this invention in September 1861 and January 1867.

In 1866, work began on the Mount Washington cog railway in New Hampshire. The first tests took place on August 29th over a distance of 500 meters. The official opening of the not yet fully completed route of the Mount Washington Cog Railway took place on August 14, 1868. On July 3, 1869, it could be put into operation along its entire length.

Technical data of the railway line

The Mount Washington Cog Railway , which is still in operation today, overcomes a height difference of 1,097 meters over a length of 4.8 kilometers. The gradient averages 25%, but 37.41% on the route with the greatest gradient. The track width of the mountain railway is 4 '8' ', which is 1,422 mm. Today only the first train of a day is operated with a steam locomotive, normal operation has been carried out by diesel-powered locomotives since 2009.

literature

• CH Hitchcock: The Approaches to Mount Washington in Winter . Chick and Andrews, Boston, USA 1871; here: Chapter IV, pages 82-85.

Web links

• Inventor's CV (en.)