the history of those two able and useful lives is almost inseparable.
During the whole of George Stephenson's long upward struggle, and
during the hard battle he had afterwards to fight on behalf of his
grand design of railways, he met with truer sympathy, appreciation, and
comfort from his brave and gifted son than from any other person
whatsoever. Unhappily, his pleasure and delight in the up-bringing of
his boy was soon to be clouded for a while by the one great bereavement
of an otherwise singularly placid and happy existence. Some two years
after her marriage, Fanny Stephenson died, as yet a mere girl, leaving
her lonely husband to take care of their baby boy alone and unaided.
Grief for this irretrievable loss drove the young widower away for a
while from his accustomed field of work among the Tyneside coal-pits;
he accepted an invitation to go to Montrose in Scotland, to overlook
the working of a large engine in some important spinning-works. He
remained in this situation for one year only; but during that time he
managed to give clear evidence of his native mechanical insight by
curing a defect in the pumps which supplied water to his engine, and
which had hitherto defied the best endeavours of the local engineers.
The young father was not unmindful, either, of his duty to his boy,
whom he had left behind with his grandfather on Tyneside; for he saved
so large a sum as 28 pounds during his engagement, which he carried
back with him in his pocket on his return to England.
A sad disappointment awaited him when at last he arrived at home. Old
Robert Stephenson, the father, had met with an accident during George's
absence which made him quite blind, and incapacitated him for further
work. Helpless and poor, he had no resource to save him from the
workhouse except George; but George acted towards him exactly as all
men who have in them a possibility of any good thing always do act
under similar circumstances. He spent 15 pounds of his hard-earned
savings to pay the debts the poor blind old engine-man had necessarily
contracted during his absence, and he took a comfortable cottage for
his father and mother at Killingworth, where he had worked before his
removal to Scotland, and where he now once more obtained employment,
still as a brakesman. In that cottage this good and brave son
supported his aged parents till their death, in all the simple luxury
that his small means would then permit him.
That, however, was not the end of George's misfortunes. Shortly after,
he was drawn by lot as a militiaman; and according to the law of that
time (for this was in 1807, during the very height of the wars against
Napoleon) he must either serve in person or else pay heavily to secure
a substitute. George chose regretfully the latter course--the only one
open to him if he wished still to support his parents and his infant
son. But in order to do so, he had to pay away the whole remainder of
his carefully hoarded savings, and even to borrow 6 pounds to make up
the payment for the substitute. It must have seemed very hard to him
to do this, and many men would have sunk under the blow, become
hopeless, or taken to careless rowdy drinking habits. George
Stephenson felt it bitterly, and gave way for a while to a natural
despondency; he would hardly have been human if he had not; but still,
he lived over it, and in the end worked on again with fuller resolution
and vigour than ever.
For several years Geordie, as his fellow-colliers affectionately called
him, continued to live on at one or other of the Killingworth
collieries. In a short time, he entered into a small contract with his
employers for "brakeing" the engines; and in the course of this
contract, he invented certain improvements in the matter of saving wear
and tear of ropes, which were both profitable to himself and also in
some small degree pointed the way toward his future plans for the
construction of railways. It is true, the two subjects have not,
apparently, much in common; but they are connected in this way, that
both proceed upon the principle of reducing the friction to the
smallest possible quantity. It was this principle that Stephenson was
gradually learning to appreciate more and more at its proper value; and
it was this which finally led him to the very summit of a great and
pre-eminently useful profession. The great advantage, indeed, of a
level railway over an up-and-down ordinary road is simply that in the
railway the resistance and friction are almost entirely got rid of.
It was in 1810, when Stephenson was twenty-nine, that his first
experiment in serious engineering was made. A coal-pit had been sunk
at Killingworth, and a rude steam-engine of that time had been set to
pump the water out of its shaft; but, somehow, the engine made no
headway against the rising springs at the bottom of the mine. For
nearly a year the engine worked away in vain, till at last, one
Saturday afternoon, Geordie Stephenson went over to examine her.
"Well, George," said a pitman, standing by, "what do you think of her?"
"Man," said George, boldly, "I could alter her and make her draw. In a
week I could let you all go the bottom." The pitman reported this
confident speech of the young brakesman to the manager; and the
manager, at his wits' end for a remedy, determined to let this fellow
Stephenson try his hand at her. After all, if he did no good, he would
be much like all the others; and anyhow he seemed to have confidence in
himself, which, if well grounded, is always a good thing.
George's confidence WAS well grounded. It was not the confidence of
ignorance, but that of knowledge. He UNDERSTOOD the engine now, and he
saw at once the root of the evil. He picked the engine to pieces,
altered it to suit the requirements of the case, and set it to work to
pump without delay. Sure enough, he kept his word; and within the
week, the mine was dry, and the men were sent to the bottom. This was
a grand job for George's future. The manager, a Mr. Dodds, not only
gave him ten pounds at once as a present, in acknowledgment of his
practical skill, but also appointed him engine-man of the new pit,
another rise in the social scale as well as in the matter of wages.
Dodds kept him in mind for the future, too; and a couple of years
later, on a vacancy occurring, he promoted the promising hand to be
engine-wright of all the collieries under his management, at a salary
of 100 pounds a year. When a man's income comes to be reckoned by the
year, rather than by the week or month, it is a sign that he is growing
into a person of importance. George had now a horse to ride upon, on
his visits of inspection to the various engines; and his work was
rather one of mechanical engineering than of mere ordinary labouring
handicraft.
The next few years of George Stephenson's life were mainly taken up in
providing for the education of his boy Robert. He had been a good son,
and he was now a good father. Feeling acutely how much he himself had
suffered, and how many years he had been put back, by his own want of a
good sound rudimentary education, he determined that Robert should not
suffer from a similar cause. Indeed, George Stephenson's splendid
abilities were kept in the background far too long, owing to his early
want of regular instruction. So the good father worked hard to send
his boy to school; not to the village teacher's only, but to a school
for gentlemen's sons at Newcastle. By mending clocks and watches in
spare moments, and by rigid economy in all unnecessary expenses
(especially beer), Stephenson had again gathered together a little
hoard, which mounted up this time to a hundred guineas. A hundred
guineas is a fortune and a capital to a working man. He was therefore
rich enough, not only to send little Robert to school, but even to buy
him a donkey, on which the boy made the journey every day from
Killingworth to Newcastle. This was in 1815, when George was
thirty-four, and Robert twelve. Perhaps no man who ever climbed so
high as George Stephenson, had ever reached so little of the way at so
comparatively late an age. For in spite of his undoubted success,
viewed from the point of view of his origin and early prospects, he was
as yet after all nothing more than the common engine-wright of the
Killingworth collieries--a long way off as yet from the distinguished
father of the railway system.
George Stephenson's connection with the locomotive, however, was even
now beginning. Already, in 1816, he and his boy had tried a somewhat
higher flight of mechanical and scientific skill than usual, in the
construction of a sun-dial, which involves a considerable amount of
careful mathematical work; and now George found that the subject of
locomotive engines was being forced by circumstances upon his
attention. From the moment he was appointed engine-wright of the
Killingworth collieries, he began to think about all possible means of
hauling coal at cheaper rates from the pit's mouth to the shipping
place on the river. For that humble object alone--an object that lay
wholly within the line of his own special business--did the great
railway projector set out upon his investigations into the
possibilities of the locomotive. Indeed, in its earliest origin, the
locomotive was almost entirely connected with coals and mining; its
application to passenger traffic on the large scale was quite a later
and secondary consideration. It was only by accident, so to speak,
that the true capabilities of railways were finally discovered in the
actual course of their practical employment.
George Stephenson was not the first person to construct either a
locomotive or a tramway. Both were already in use, in more or less
rude forms, at several collieries. But he WAS the first person to
bring the two to such a pitch of perfection, that what had been at
first a mere clumsy mining contrivance, became developed into a smooth
and easy iron highway for the rapid and convenient conveyance of goods
and passengers over immense distances. Of course, this great
invention, like all other great inventions, was not the work of one day
or one man. Many previous heads had helped to prepare the way for
George Stephenson; and George Stephenson himself had been working at
the subject for many years before he even reached the first stage of
realized endeavour. As early as 1814 he constructed his first
locomotive at Killingworth colliery; it was not until 1822 that he laid
the first rail of his first large line, the Stockton and Darlington
Railway.
Stephenson's earliest important improvement in the locomotive consisted
in his invention of what is called the steam-blast, by which the steam
is made to increase the draught of the fire, and so largely add to the
effectiveness of the engine. It was this invention that enabled him at
last to make the railway into the great carrier of the world, and to
begin the greatest social and commercial upheaval that has ever
occurred in the whole history of the human race.
Meanwhile, however, George was not entirely occupied with the
consideration of his growing engine. He had the clocks and watches to
mend; he had Robert's schooling to look after; and he had another
practical matter even nearer home than the locomotive on which to
exercise his inventive genius. One day, in 1814, the main gallery of
the colliery caught fire. Stephenson at once descended into the
burning pit, with a chosen band of volunteers, who displayed the usual
heroic courage of colliers in going to the rescue of their comrades;
and, at the risk of their lives, these brave men bricked up the burning
portion, and so, by excluding the air, put out the dangerous fire.
Still, even so, several of the workmen had been suffocated, and one of
the pitmen asked Geordie in dismay whether nothing could be done to
prevent such terrible disasters in future. "The price of coal-mining
now," he said, "is pitmen's lives." Stephenson promised to think the
matter over; and he did think it over with good effect. The result of
his thought was the apparatus still affectionately known to the pitmen
as "the Geordie lamp." It is a lamp so constructed that the flame
cannot pass out into the air outside, and so cause explosions in the
dangerous fire-damp which is always liable to occur abundantly in the
galleries of coal mines. By this invention alone George Stephenson's
name and memory might have been kept green for ever; for his lamp has
been the means of saving thousands of lives from a sudden, a terrible,
and a pitiful death. Most accidents that now occur in mines are due to
the neglect of ordinary precautions, and to the perverse habit of
carrying a naked lighted candle in the hand (contrary to regulations)
instead of a carefully guarded safety lamp. Yet so culpably reckless
of their own and other men's lives are a large number of people
everywhere, that in spite of the most stringent and salutary rules,
explosions from this cause (and, therefore, easily avoidable) take
place constantly to the present day, though far less frequently than
before the invention of the Geordie lamp.
Curiously enough, at the very time when George Stephenson was busy
inventing his lamp at Killingworth, Sir Humphrey Davy was working at
just the same matter in London; and the two lamps, though a little
different in minor points of construction, are practically the same in
general principle. Now, Sir Humphrey was then the great fashionable
natural philosopher of the day, the favourite of London society, and
the popular lecturer of the Royal Institution. His friends thought it a
monstrous idea that his splendid life-saving apparatus should have been
independently devised by "an engine-wright of Killingworth of the name
of Stephenson--a person not even possessing a knowledge of the elements
of chemistry." This sounds very odd reading at the present day, when
the engine-wright of the name of Stephenson has altered the whole face
of the world, while Davy is chiefly remembered as a meritorious and
able chemist; but at the time, Stephenson's claim to the invention met
with little courtesy from the great public of London, where a meeting
was held on purpose to denounce his right to the credit of the
invention. What the coal-owners and colliers of the North Country
thought about the matter was sufficiently shown by their subscription
of 1000 pounds, as a Stephenson testimonial fund. With part of the
money, a silver tankard was presented to the deserving engine-wright,
while the remainder of the sum was handed over to him in ready cash. A
very acceptable present it was, and one which George Stephenson
remembered with pride down to his dying day. The Geordie lamp
continues in use to the present moment in the Tyneside collieries with
excellent effect.
For some years more, Mr. Stephenson (he is now fairly entitled to that
respectable prefix) went on still further experimenting on the question
of locomotives and railways. He was now beginning to learn that much
unnecessary wear and tear arose on the short lines of rail down from
the pit's mouths to the loading-places on the river by the inequalities
and roughnesses of the joints; and he invented a method of overlapping
the rails which quite got over this source of loss--loss of speed, loss
of power, and loss of material at once. It was in 1819 that he laid
down his first considerable piece of road, the Hetton railway. The
owners of a colliery at the village of Hetton, in Durham, determined to
replace their waggon road by a locomotive line; and they invited the
now locally famous Killingworth engine-wright to act as their engineer.
Stephenson gladly undertook the post; and he laid down a railway of
eight miles in length, on the larger part of which the trucks were to
be drawn by "the iron horse," as people now began to style the altered
and improved locomotive. The Hetton railway was opened in 1822, and
the assembled crowd were delighted at beholding a single engine draw
seventeen loaded trucks after it, at the extraordinary rate of four
miles an hour--nearly as fast as a man could walk. Whence it may be
gathered that Stephenson's ideas upon the question of speed were still
on a very humble scale indeed.
Before the Hetton railway was opened, however, George Stephenson had
shown one more proof of his excellence as a father by sending his boy
Robert, now nineteen, to Edinburgh University. It was a serious
expense for a man who was even now, after all, hardly more than a
working man of the superior grade; but George Stephenson was well
repaid for the sacrifice he thus made on behalf of his only son. He
lived to see him the greatest practical engineer of his own time, and
to feel that his success was in large measure due to the wider and more
accurate scientific training the lad had received from his Edinburgh
teachers.
In 1819 George married again, his second wife being the daughter of a
farmer at Black Callerton.
The work which finally secured the position of George Stephenson and of
his dearly loved locomotive was the Stockton and Darlington railway.
Like all the other early railways, it was originally projected simply
as a mineral line. Darlington lies in the centre of a rich inland
mining district; but the impossibility of getting the coal carried to
the sea by cart or donkey, long prevented the opening up of its immense
natural wealth. At last, as early as 1817, Edward Pease and a few
other enterprising Darlington Quakers determined to build a line of
railway from the mining region to Stockton, on the river Tees, where
the coal could be loaded into sea-going ships. It was a very long
line, compared to any railway that had yet been constructed; but it was
still only to be worked by horse-power--to be, in fact, what we now
call a tramway, rather than a railway in the modern sense. However,
while the plan was still undecided, George Stephenson, who had heard
about the proposed scheme, went over to Darlington one day, and boldly
asked to see Mr. Pease. The good Quaker received him kindly, and
listened to his arguments in favour of the locomotive. "Come over to
Killingworth some day and see my engine at work," said Stephenson,
confidently; "and if you do you will never think of horses again." Mr.
Pease, with Quaker caution, came and looked. George put the engine
through its paces, and showed off its marvellous capabilities to such
good effect that Edward Pease was immediately converted. Henceforth,
he became a decided advocate of locomotives, and greatly aided by his
wealth and influence in securing their final triumph.
Not only that, but Mr. Pease also aided Stephenson in carrying out a
design which George had long had upon his mind--the establishment of a
regular locomotive factory, where the work of engine-making for this
particular purpose might be carried on with all the necessary finish
and accuracy. George himself put into the concern his precious 1000
pounds, not one penny of which he had yet touched; while Pease and a
friend advanced as much between them. A factory was forthwith started
at Newcastle on a small scale, and the hardworking engine-wright found
himself now fully advanced to the commercial dignity of Stephenson and
Co. With the gradual growth of railways, that humble Newcastle factory
grew gradually into one of the largest and wealthiest manufacturing
establishments in all England.
Meanwhile, Stephenson was eagerly pushing on the survey of the Stockton
and Darlington railway, all the more gladly now that he knew it was to
be worked by means of his own adopted child, the beloved locomotive.
He worked at his line early and late; he took the sights with the
spirit-level with his own eye; he was determined to make it a model
railway. It was a long and heavy work, for railway surveying was then
a new art, and the appliances were all fresh and experimental; but in
the end, Stephenson brought it to a happy conclusion, and struck at
once the death-blow of the old road-travelling system. The line was
opened successfully in 1825, and the engine started off on the
inaugural ceremony with a magnificent train of thirty-eight vehicles.
"Such was its velocity," says a newspaper of the day, "that in some
parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour."
The success of the Stockton and Darlington railway was so immense and
unexpected, the number of passengers who went by it was so great, and
the quantity of coal carried for shipment so far beyond anything the
projectors themselves could have anticipated, that a desire soon began
to be felt for similar works in other places. There are no two towns in
England which absolutely need a railway communication from one to the
other so much as Liverpool and Manchester. The first is the great port
of entry for cotton, the second is the great centre of its manufacture.
The Bridgewater canal had helped for a time to make up for the want of
water communication between those two closely connected towns; but as
trade developed, the canal became too small for the demands upon it,
and the need for an additional means of intercourse was deeply felt. A
committee was formed to build a railway in this busy district, and
after a short time George Stephenson was engaged to superintend its
construction.
A long and severe fight was fought over the Liverpool and Manchester
railway, and it was at first doubtful whether the scheme would ever be
carried out. Many great landowners were strongly opposed to it, and
tried their best to keep the bill for authorizing it from passing
through Parliament. Stephenson himself was compelled to appear in
London as a witness before a parliamentary committee, and was closely
cross-examined as to the possibilities of his plan. In those days,
even after the success of the Stockton and Darlington line, his views
about the future of railways were still regarded by most sober persons
as ridiculously wild and enthusiastic; while the notion that trains
might be made to travel twice as fast as stage-coaches, was scouted as
the most palpable and ridiculous delusion. One of the members of the
committee pressed Stephenson very hard with questions. "Suppose," he
said, "a cow were to get upon the line, and the engine were to come
into collision with it; wouldn't that be very awkward, now?" George
looked up at him with a merry twinkle of the eye, and answered in his
broad North Country dialect, "Oo, ay, very awkward for the COO."
In spite of all Stephenson's earnestness and mother wit, however,
Parliament refused to pass the bill (in 1825), and for the moment the
engineer's vexation was bitter to behold. He and his friends plucked
up heart, however; they were fighting the winning battle against
prejudice and obstruction, and they were sure to conquer in the long
run. The line was resurveyed by other engineers; the lands of the
hostile owners were avoided; the causes of offence were dexterously
smoothed down; and after another hard fight, in 1826, the bill
authorizing the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester railway
was finally passed. The board at once appointed Stephenson engineer
for constructing the line, at a salary of 1000 pounds a year. George
might now fairly consider himself entitled to the honours of an Esquire.