A writer in that valuable miscellany _Household Words_, remarks:—“About
thirteen years ago, a Quaker was walking in a field in Northumberland,
when a thought struck him. The man who was walking was named Thomas
Edmonson. He had been, though a Friend, not a very successful man in
life. He was a man of integrity and honour, as he afterwards abundantly
proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself as a
clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the
course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to have to
write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness
of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was
wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time,
trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a
mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot
on the before mentioned field that the idea struck him how all that he
wished might be done by a machine—how tickets might be printed with the
names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the month, and all
of them from end to end of the kingdom, on one uniform system. Most
inventors accomplish their great deeds by degrees—one thought suggesting
another from time to time; but, when Thomas Edmonson showed his family
the spot in the field where his invention occurred to him, he used to say
that it came to his mind complete, in its whole scope and all its
details. Out of it has grown the mighty institution of the Railway
Clearing House; and with it the grand organization by which the Railways
of the United Kingdom act, in regard to the convenience of individuals,
as a unity. We may see at a glance the difference to every one of us of
the present organized system—by which we can take our tickets from almost
any place to another, and get into a carriage on almost any of our great
lines, to be conveyed without further care to the opposite end of the
kingdom—and the unorganized condition of affairs from which Mr. Edmonson
rescued us, whereby we should have been compelled to shift ourselves and
our luggage from time to time, buying new tickets, waiting while they
were filled up, waiting at almost every point of the journey, and having
to do it with divers companies who had nothing to do with each other but
to find fault and be jealous.
“On Mr. Edmonson’s machines may be seen the name of Blaycock; Blaycock
was a watchmaker, and an acquaintance of Edmonson’s, and a man whom he
knew to be capable of working out his idea. He told him what he wanted;
and Blaycock understood him, and realized his thought. The third machine
that they made was nearly as good as those now in use. The one we saw
had scarcely wanted five shillings worth of repairs in five years; and,
when it needs more, it will be from sheer wearing away of the brass-work,
by constant hard friction. The Manchester and Leeds Railway Company were
the first to avail themselves of Mr. Edmonson’s invention; and they
secured his services at their station at Oldham Road, for a time. He
took out a patent; and his invention became so widely known and
appreciated, that he soon withdrew himself from all other engagements, to
perfect its details and provide tickets to meet the daily growing demand.
He let out his patent on profitable terms—ten shillings per mile per
annum; that is, a railway of thirty miles long paid him fifteen pounds a
year for a license to print its own tickets by his apparatus; and a
railway of sixty miles long paid him thirty pounds, and so on. As his
profits began to come in, he began to spend them; and it is not the least
interesting part of his history to see how. It has been told that he was
a bankrupt early in life. The very first use he made of his money was to
pay every shilling that he ever owed. Ho was forty-six when he took that
walk in the field in Northumberland. He was fifty-eight when he died, on
the twenty-second of June last year.”