That veteran engineer, Colonel R. E. Crompton, has done many
things in the course of a well-spent life, and not the least remarkable of them is the terse and compact volume in which he gives his Reminiscences. (Constable. 14s.). Here he relates how, as a boy, he met Samuel Rogers and had Lewis Carroll as a schoolfellow ; how he won a naval medal in the Crimean War before going to Harrow and joining the Rifle Brigade ; how he started mechanical traction in India in 1870, and drove a road locomotive from Ipswich to Edinburgh and back in 1871 ; how, after leaving India, he came home to be a pioneer of electric lighting in India ; and how he helped to design the first tanks. Colonel Crompton has an alert mind, open to new ideas, and his book is most stimulating. But it shows also the difficulties that face and often overcome the pioneer. For had Colonel Crompton's steam road vehicles, which worked successfully in India in the early seventies, been encouraged by the Indian Government instead of being abandoned after Lord Mayo's death, India would have long ago been setting an example to England, instead of having to wait till now for the beginnings of mechanical transport. Many inventions have been killed in that way right through the ages by dull persons in authority.
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