Oliver Evans quotes:

A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day.... Engines will drive boats 10 or 12 miles an hour, and there will be hundreds of steamers running on the Mississippi, as predicted years ago.

It frequently happens that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other.

People did not even then like to eat dirt, if they could see it.