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As odd as it seems, in this era, the future of land transportation appeared to be on water, in that canals were very much in vogue. Nevertheless, a brief controversy of "Canals vs. rails" arose in New York, where a commission was discussing the planning and building of the Erie Canal. In their midst appeared a prophet of the new order, John Stevens (1749-1838), the apostle of the locomotive. His motive aside, he was regarded as clearly loco by the canal commission when he proposed building a railroad instead of the canal. A calm, persistent, scholarly, almost scientific inventor, he was summarily dismissed as a crackpot by those who refused to open their minds to novelty.
Chief among these was Chancellor Robert R. Livingston. In 1811, as spokesman for the old order—or more probably for the monopoly he and Fulton shared to run steamboats in New York waters—he objected to the building of a railroad for a number of theoretical reasons, one of which was that it would have to be set "At least four feet below the earth's surface, to avoid frost, and three feet above to avoid snow". Showing no apparent sense of incongruity, he championed the canal, which would be frozen solid for four months every year. In fact, most people considered the canal, with its traditions dating back to the Egyptian dynasties, the safe bet and regarded the railroad, which was still experimental, as impractical. Actually, the development of the railroad depended upon the acceptance of two independent elements: A roadway of rails and the steam engine as the source of power. Just as the railroad in general had been rejected by rationalizations before the fact, so too was the idea of a road of rails. No amount of argumentation could persuade anyone that smooth wheels on smooth tracks could generate enough friction to move a locomotive, much less one drawing a train. Of course, anyone who tested such a system would have found that it worked, but an amazing series of contraptions—mechanical legs pushing a car from behind, cogged wheels on notched tracks, etc.—were tried before a determined engineer named William Hedley demonstrated empirically in 1813 that a locomotive could indeed pull a train on smooth tracks. Once smooth rails had been accepted, attention shifted to the source of power, with the major battle being that of the horse versus steam. Although Mr. Hedley had proved that a locomotive could pull a train, most minds were still transfixed by the idea of horse drawn vehicles. Within that limiting framework, an earlier-day efficiency expert imagined that a platform could be placed on the first car so that the horse could jump up on it when the train came to a downgrade. Further, to save time, the animal could be fed while thus resting. By way of compromise, a "Horse locomotive" was also proposed, with the poor beast driving the wheels by working a treadmill. However, eventually horse sense and steam power prevailed because visionary mechanics ignored what was being thought and said and simply demonstrated the superiority of the steam engine.
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