Marc Seguin

Marc Seguin was a French engineer and inventor who lived from April 20, 1786 to February 24, 1875 and is credited with two very different but equally durable inventions, the wire-cable suspension bridge and the multi-tubular steam boiler. His boiler design replaced a single large flue running from the furnace with many small-diameter fire tubes that carried hot gas back through the water on their way to the chimney, a change that dramatically increased the heating surface in contact with the water and let a boiler of a given size raise steam far faster. Fitted to early locomotives, Seguin's tubular boiler let trains raise their speed from roughly four miles per hour to about twenty-five, a gain that helped make railroads a genuinely practical form of transport rather than a slow curiosity. In 1829 he delivered two locomotives of his own design to the Saint-Etienne to Lyon railway, one of the first railway lines built in continental Europe, putting his boiler design to work on one of the era's earliest working lines.