SOMETIMES RAILWAY PRESERVATION IS SIMPLY RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

I had originally flagged Steven Hayward's "So we can’t say 'steam engines' anymore with the frisson of a P.G. Wodehouse character?" for a Friday short take.  (I suspect Mr Hayward is Power Line's resident ferroequinologist.)  Then Reason's Liz Wolfe tied on to the story.

Richard Trevithick did not own slaves. He was a barely literate engineer, born toward the end of the 18th century, who grappled with—and ultimately solved—the question of how to improve the steam engine's size and efficiency. He's still getting canceled, though, or at least linked to the slave trade he played no part in.

Apparently, because Locomotion and the Steam Elephant and the rest helped Britannia rule the waves, and ships carrying slaves rode those waves, even Trevithick's work had to be "contextualized."  Does that contextualization include "reducing carbon dioxide emissions?"

The steam-powered locomotive was born out of necessity; in Cornwall, where Trevithick lived and worked at the time, there were few coal deposits, but lots of ore mining. Mine operators needed to conserve fuel and needed lightweight, more efficient engines to better transport materials to mining sites.

It's all so stupid, only an academician would believe it. "That he is now receiving posthumous dishonor, for sins of the British empire that he played no personal part in, is more a reflection of the social justice–obsessed times we live in than any fault of his."  And how interesting are museums going to be when every exhibit has to be "contextualized" by the most tendentious manifestations of presentism?