Close your eyes and imagine a time, almost two hundred years ago, when there were no cars. No airplanes. No buses. If you wanted to go somewhere, you walked, or you rode a horse, or a horse pulled you in a wagon.
Even the very first railroads used horses! Workers laid down tracks, and horses pulled the cars along them. The cars rolled more smoothly on the rails than on bumpy dirt roads, so a horse could pull more people and more things. But it was still a horse, clip-clopping along.
In a city called Baltimore, a railroad called the Baltimore and Ohio was building one of the very first railroads in America. And the people in charge had a big question.
"Should we use horses to pull our trains," they asked, "or should we try one of those new steam engines?"
A tiny engine
A man named Peter Cooper thought steam was the answer. Peter Cooper was an inventor who loved to build things. He decided to build a little steam engine to show everyone what steam could do.
And it really was little. It was so small that people called it Tom Thumb, after a tiny hero in an old fairy tale, a boy who was no bigger than his father's thumb.
Tom Thumb didn't look much like the trains you know. It had a tall, skinny boiler standing straight up, like a big metal can. Inside, a fire boiled water to make steam, and the steam pushed the engine along the rails. To keep the fire burning hot, it had a fan that blew air into the fire, and that fan was turned by a belt, like a big rubber band going around a wheel.
In the summer of 1830, Tom Thumb took the railroad's leaders on a ride. Puff, puff, puff, it chugged along the track, carrying passengers behind it. It worked!
The great race
Now, here's the part of the story that people have told for almost two hundred years.
The story goes that on the way back from that ride, Tom Thumb met a horse. Not just any horse, but a big, strong, gray horse pulling a railroad car on the track right next to it. And the horse's driver had an idea.
"Let's race!" he called out.
Peter Cooper smiled. "All right!" he said.
Ready... set... GO!
The horse leaped forward. Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop! The horse took the lead right away, because Tom Thumb needed a little time to get going. Its little engine puffed, slowly at first. Puff... puff... puff...
But then Tom Thumb began to speed up. Puff, puff, puff-puff-puff! Faster and faster. It caught up to the horse. It pulled even with the horse. And then... it pulled ahead! The passengers on Tom Thumb cheered and waved their hats.
Oh no!
But just when it looked like Tom Thumb was going to win, something went wrong.
Uh-oh! The belt that turned the fan slipped off its wheel. Without the fan blowing air, the fire didn't burn as hot. Without a hot fire, there wasn't as much steam. And without steam, Tom Thumb began to slow down. Puff... puff...... puff.........
Peter Cooper tried to fix it. He grabbed the belt and worked as fast as he could to put it back on. But it was too late. Clip-clop, clip-clop, the gray horse trotted right past and crossed the finish line first.
The horse had won the race.
Losing and winning
You might think that was the end of steam engines in Baltimore. But it wasn't.
Because everyone who watched had seen something amazing. For a little while, that tiny engine had gone faster than a horse. And they knew that steam engines could be made bigger and stronger, and that they could be fixed when something broke. A horse gets tired after a long run. A steam engine just needs more fuel and water.
So the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad decided to use steam. Before long, steam engines were pulling trains all across America, bigger and faster and stronger than little Tom Thumb could ever have imagined.
Tom Thumb lost the race. But in a way, it won something much bigger. It showed everyone what was possible.
Sometimes the most important thing isn't winning. Sometimes it's showing people what you can do.
The End