New Yorker Peter Cooper, who has risen…

New Yorker Peter Cooper, who has risen from being a seventeen-year-old coachmaker’s apprentice to the thirty-eight-year-old owner of a glue company, iron mines, and several foundries, builds the first locomotive in the U.S., using old musket barrels for boiler tubing.

Anxious for the newly formed Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) Railroad to use locomotives instead of horses for motive power, tests the tiny experimental locomotive Tom Thumb on a double track outside of Baltimore, Maryland on August 28, 1830.

Although the 1.43-horsepower Tom Thumb loses a famous race with a coach drawn by a gray horse when it throws a pulley belt, the demonstration convinces B & O officials to convert from horse power to steam power.