March 4, 1889

For this essay, I require a detailed description of something important that muggles have done or invented without the help of wizards. The topic choice is open as long as it is appropriate for a classroom setting. This essay is to be 150-250 words and will be due by the end of term.

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During what the muggles term the "Industrial Revolution", they invented a great many things that changed their way of life. Amongst those was the steam engine, and the introduction of this method of power to steam locomotives. As the name locomotive suggests, these trains were made to help transport people from place to place via the railways. Muggles not having access to brooms or portkeys or flooing, this must have seemed a severe priority to their ease of life, and travelling around the country. It certainly must have spared a great many horses.

Steam engine trains use coal somehow to power themselves, and steam comes out somewhere, and in this regard they have proved so useful a mode of transportation that even wizards adopted them: the Hogwarts Express, as you see, seems to operate in precisely the same way, although I am sure it has been magically modified in part. This idea was proposed by Ottaline Gambol, Minister of Magic in 1827, which shows how highly-regarded an invention the steam locomotive was. It has lost no popularity now, and I hear muggle London even has an underground railway system. So it must be good.


*I count myself lucky my parents did not name me after Ottaline Gambol. Or after steam engines, for that matter.

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