II.
GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN.
Any time about the year 1786, a stranger in the streets of the grimy
colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed by without
notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years old, Geordie
Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and looking to the
outward eye in no way different from any of the other colliers' children
who loitered about him. Nevertheless, that ragged boy was yet destined
in after-life to alter the whole face of England and the world by those
wonderful railways, which he more than any other man was instrumental in
first constructing; and the story of his life may rank perhaps as one of
the most marvellous in the whole marvellous history of able and
successful British working men.
George Stephenson was born in June, 1781, the son of a fireman who
tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of a
penniless family of six children. So poor was his father, indeed, that
the whole household lived in a single room, with bare floor and mud
wall; and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt fashion without any
schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B when he was a big lad of
seventeen. At an age when he ought to have been learning his letters, he
was bird's-nesting in the fields or running errands to the Wylam shops;
and as soon as he was old enough to earn a few pence by light work, he
was set to tend cows at the magnificent wages of twopence a day, in the
village of Dewley Burn, close by, to which his father had then removed.
It might have seemed at first as though the future railway engineer was
going to settle down quietly to the useful but uneventful life of an
agricultural labourer; for from tending cows he proceeded in due time
(with a splendid advance of twopence) to leading the horses at the
plough, spudding thistles, and hoeing turnips on his employer's farm.
But the native bent of a powerful mind usually shows itself very early;
and even during the days when Geordie was still stumbling across the
freshly ploughed clods or driving the cows to pasture with a bunch of
hazel twigs, his taste for mechanics already made itself felt in a very
marked and practical fashion. During all his leisure time, the future
engineer and his chum Bill Thirlwall occupied themselves with making
clay models of engines, and fitting up a winding machine with corks and
twine like those which lifted the colliery baskets. Though Geordie
Stephenson didn't go to school at the village teacher's, he was teaching
himself in his own way by close observation and keen comprehension of
all the machines and engines he could come across.
Naturally, to such a boy, the great ambition of his life was to be
released from the hoeing and spudding, and set to work at his father's
colliery. Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at last he was taken
on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to clear the loads from
stones and rubbish. It wasn't a very dignified position, to be sure, but
it was the first step that led the way to the construction of the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Geordie was now fairly free from the
uncongenial drudgery of farm life, and able to follow his own
inclinations in the direction of mechanical labour. Besides, was he not
earning the grand sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to
eightpence a little later on, when he rose to the more responsible and
serious work of driving the gin-horse? A proud day indeed it was for him
when, at fourteen, he was finally permitted to aid his father in firing
the colliery engine; though he was still such a very small boy that he
used to run away and hide when the owner went his rounds of inspection,
for fear he should be thought too little to earn his untold wealth of a
shilling a day in such a grown-up occupation. Humbler beginnings were
never any man's who lived to become the honoured guest, not of kings and
princes only, but of the truly greatest and noblest in the land.
A coal-miner's life is often a very shifting one; for the coal in
particular collieries gets worked out from time to time; and he has to
remove, accordingly, to fresh quarters, wherever employment happens to
be found. This was very much the case with George Stephenson and his
family; all of them being obliged to remove several times over during
his childish days in search of new openings. Shortly after Geordie had
attained to the responsible position of assistant fireman, his father
was compelled, by the closing of Dewley Burn mine, to get a fresh
situation hard by at Newburn. George accompanied him, and found
employment as full fireman at a small working, whose little engine he
undertook to manage in partnership with a mate, each of them tending the
fire night and day by twelve-hour shifts. Two years later, his wages
were raised to twelve shillings a week, a sure mark of his diligent and
honest work; so that George was not far wrong in remarking to a fellow-
workman at the time that he now considered himself a made man for life.
During all this time, George Stephenson never for a moment ceased to
study and endeavour to understand the working of every part in the
engine that he tended. He was not satisfied, as too many workmen are,
with merely learning the routine work of his own trade; with merely
knowing that he must turn such and such a tap or valve in order to
produce such and such a desired result: he wanted to see for himself how
and why the engine did this or that, what was the use and object of
piston and cylinder and crank and joint and condenser--in short, fully
to understand the underlying principle of its construction. He took it
to pieces for cleaning whenever it was needful; he made working models
of it after his old childish pattern; he even ventured to tinker it up
when out of order on his own responsibility. Thus he learnt at last
something of the theory of the steam-engine, and learnt also by the way
a great deal about the general principles of mechanical science. Still,
even now, incredible as it seems, the future father of railways couldn't
yet read; and he found this terrible drawback told fatally against his
further progress. Whenever he wanted to learn something that he didn't
quite understand, he was always referred for information to a Book. Oh,
those books; those mysterious, unattainable, incomprehensible books; how
they must have bothered and worried poor intelligent and aspiring but
still painfully ignorant young George Stephenson! Though he was already
trying singularly valuable experiments in his own way, he hadn't yet
even begun to learn his letters.
Under these circumstances, George Stephenson, eager and anxious for
further knowledge, took a really heroic resolution. He wasn't ashamed to
go to school. Though now a full workman on his own account, about
eighteen years old, he began to attend the night school at the
neighbouring village of Walbottle, where he took lessons in reading
three evenings every week. It is a great thing when a man is not ashamed
to learn. Many men are; they consider themselves so immensely wise that
they look upon it as an impertinence in anybody to try to tell them
anything they don't know already. Truly wise or truly great men--men
with the capability in them for doing anything worthy in their
generation--never feel this false and foolish shame. They know that most
other people know some things in some directions which they do not, and
they are glad to be instructed in them whenever opportunity offers. This
wisdom George Stephenson possessed in sufficient degree to make him feel
more ashamed of his ignorance than of the steps necessary in order to
conquer it. Being a diligent and willing scholar, he soon learnt to
read, and by the time he was nineteen he had learnt how to write also.
At arithmetic, a science closely allied to his native mechanical bent,
he was particularly apt, and beat all the other scholars at the village
night school. This resolute effort at education was the real turning-
point in George Stephenson's remarkable career, the first step on the
ladder whose topmost rung led him so high that he himself must almost
have felt giddy at the unwonted elevation.
Shortly after, young Stephenson gained yet another promotion in being
raised to the rank of brakesman, whose duty it was to slacken the engine
when the full baskets of coal reached the top of the shaft. This was a
more serious and responsible post than any he had yet filled, and one
for which only the best and steadiest workmen were ever selected. His
wages now amounted to a pound a week, a very large sum in those days for
a skilled working-man.
Meanwhile, George, like most other young men, had fallen in love. His
sweetheart, Fanny Henderson, was servant at the small farmhouse where he
had taken lodgings since leaving his father's home; and though but
little is known about her (for she unhappily died before George had
begun to rise to fame and fortune), what little we do know seems to show
that she was in every respect a fitting wife for the active young
brakesman, and a fitting mother for his equally celebrated son, Robert
Stephenson. Fired by the honourable desire to marry Fanny, with a proper
regard for prudence, George set himself to work to learn cobbling in his
spare moments; and so successfully did he cobble the worn shoes of his
fellow-colliers after working hours, that before long he contrived to
save a whole guinea out of his humble earnings. That guinea was the
first step towards an enormous fortune; a fortune, too, all accumulated
by steady toil and constant useful labour for the ultimate benefit of
his fellow-men. To make a fortune is the smallest and least noble of all
possible personal ambitions; but to save the first guinea which leads us
on at last to independence and modest comfort is indeed an important
turning-point in every prudent man's career. Geordie Stephenson was so
justly proud of his achievement in this respect that he told a friend in
confidence he might now consider himself a rich man.
By the time George was twenty-one, he had saved up enough by constant
care to feel that he might safely embark on the sea of housekeeping. He
was able to take a small cottage lodging for himself and Fanny, at
Willington Quay, near his work at the moment, and to furnish it with the
simple comfort which was all that their existing needs demanded. He
married Fanny on the 28th of November, 1802; and the young couple
proceeded at once to their new home. Here George laboured harder than
ever, as became the head of a family. He was no more ashamed of odd jobs
than he had been of learning the alphabet. He worked overtime at
emptying ballast from ships; he continued to cobble, to cut lasts, and
even to try his hand at regular shoemaking; furthermore, he actually
acquired the art of mending clocks, a matter which lay strictly in his
own line, and he thus earned a tidy penny at odd hours by doctoring all
the rusty or wheezy old timepieces of all his neighbours. Nor did he
neglect his mechanical education meanwhile; for he was always at work
upon various devices for inventing a perpetual motion machine. Now
perpetual motion is the most foolish will-o'-the-wisp that ever engaged
a sane man's attention: the thing has been proved to be impossible from
every conceivable point of view, and the attempt to achieve it, if
pursued to the last point, can only end in disappointment if not in
ruin. Still, for all that, the work George Stephenson spent upon this
unpractical object did really help to give him an insight into
mechanical science which proved very useful to him at a later date. He
didn't discover perpetual motion, but he did invent at last the real
means for making the locomotive engine a practical power in the matter
of travelling.
A year later, George's only son Robert was born; and from that moment
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 L28
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 L15 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 L6 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 L100 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 L1000, 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 L1000, 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 L1000 a year. George might now fairly consider himself
entitled to the honours of an Esquire.
The line was a difficult one to construct; but George Stephenson set
about it with the skill and knowledge acquired during many years of slow
experience; and he performed it with distinguished success. He was now
forty-four; and he had had more to do with the laying down of rails than
any other man then living. The great difficulty of the Liverpool and
Manchester line lay in the fact that it had to traverse a vast shaking
bog or morass, Chat Moss, which the best engineers had emphatically
declared it would be impossible to cross. George Stephenson, however,
had a plan for making the impossible possible. He simply floated his
line on a broad bottom, like a ship, on the top of the quaking quagmire;
and proceeded to lay down his rails on this seemingly fragile support
without further scruple. It answered admirably, and still answers to the
present day. The other works on the railway, especially the cuttings,
were such as might well have appalled the boldest heart in those
experimental ages of railway enterprise. It is easy enough for us now to
undertake tunnelling great hills or filling up wide valleys with long
ranges of viaduct, because the thing has been done so often, and the
prospect of earning a fair return on the money sunk can be calculated
with so high a degree of reasonable probability. But it required no
little faith for George Stephenson and his backers to drive a level
road, for the first time, through solid rocks and over trembling
morasses, the whole way from Liverpool to Manchester. He persevered,
however, and in 1830, after four years' toilsome and ceaseless labour,
during which he had worked far-harder than the sturdiest navvy on the
line, his railway was finally opened for regular traffic.
Before the completion of the railway, George Stephenson had taken part
in a great contest for the best locomotive at Liverpool, a prize of L500
having been offered by the company to the successful competitor.
Stephenson sent in his improved model, the Rocket, constructed after
plans of his own and his son Robert's, and it gained the prize against
all its rivals, travelling at what was then considered the incredible
rate of 35 miles an hour. It was thus satisfactorily settled that the
locomotive was the best power for drawing carriages on railways, and
George Stephenson's long battle was thus at last practically won. The
opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway was an era in the
history of the world. From the moment that great undertaking was
complete, there could no longer be any doubt about the utility and
desirability of railways, and all opposition died away almost at once.
New lines began immediately to be laid out, and in an incredibly short
time the face of England was scarred by the main trunks in that network
of iron roads with which its whole surface is now so closely covered.
The enormous development of the railway system benefited the Stephenson
family in more than one way. Robert Stephenson became the engineer of
the vast series of lines now known as the London and North Western; and
the increased demand for locomotives caused George Stephenson's small
factory at Newcastle to blossom out suddenly into an immense and
flourishing manufacturing concern.
The rest of George Stephenson's life is one long story of unbroken
success. In 1831, the year after the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester line, George, being now fifty, began to think of settling
down in a more permanent home. His son Robert, who was surveying the
Leicester and Swannington railway, observed on an estate called
Snibston, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, what to his experienced geological eye
looked like the probable indications of coal beneath the surface. He
wrote to his father about it, and as the estate was at the time for
sale, George, now a comparatively wealthy man, bought it up on his son's
recommendation. He also pitched his home close by at Alton Grange, and
began to sink shafts in search of coal. He found it in due time; and
thus, in addition to his Newcastle works he became a flourishing
colliery proprietor. It is pleasing to note that Stephenson, unlike too
many other self-made men, always treated his workmen with the greatest
kindness and consideration, erecting admirable cottages for their
accommodation, and providing them with church, chapel, and schools for
their religious and social education.
While living at Alton Grange, Stephenson was engaged in laying out
several new lines in the middle and north of England, especially the
Grand Junction and the Midland, both of which he constructed with great
boldness and practical skill. As he grew older and more famous, he began
to mix in the truly best society of England; his acquaintance being
sought by all the most eminent men in literature, science, and political
life. Though but an uneducated working man by origin, George Stephenson
had so improved his mind by constant thought and expansive self-
education, that he was able to meet these able and distinguished friends
of his later days on terms of perfect intellectual and social equality.
To the last, however, he never forgot his older and poorer friends, nor
was he ever ashamed of their acquaintance. A pleasant trait is narrated
by his genial biographer, Dr. Smiles, who notices that on one occasion
he stopped to speak to one of his wealthy acquaintances in a fine
carriage, and then turned to shake hands with the coachman on the box,
whom he had known and respected in his earlier days. He enjoyed, too,
the rare pleasure of feeling his greatness recognized in his own time:
and once, when he went over to Brussels on a visit to the king of the
Belgians, he was pleased and surprised, as the royal party entered the
ball-room at the Town Hall, to hear a general murmur among the guests of
"Which is Stephenson?"
George Stephenson continued to live for sixteen years, first at Alton
Grange, and afterwards at Tapton House, near Chesterfield, in comfort
and opulence; growing big pines and melons, keeping birds and dogs, and
indulging himself towards the end in the well-earned repose to which his
useful and laborious life fully entitled him. At last, on the 12th of
August, 1848, he died suddenly of intermittent fever, in his sixty-
seventh year, and was peacefully buried in Chesterfield church. Probably
no one man who ever lived did so much to change and renovate the whole
aspect of human life as George Stephenson; and, unlike many other
authors of great revolutions, he lived long enough to see the full
result of his splendid labours in the girdling of England by his iron
roads. A grand and simple man, he worked honestly and steadfastly
throughout his days, and he found his reward in the unprecedented
benefits which his locomotive was even then conferring upon his fellow-
men. It is indeed wonderful to think how very different is the England
in which we live to-day, from that in which we might possibly have been
living were it not for the barefooted little collier boy who made clay
models of engines at Wylam, and who grew at last into the great and
famous engineer of the marvellous Liverpool and Manchester railway. The
main characteristic of George Stephenson was perseverance; and it was
that perseverance that enabled him at last to carry out his magnificent
schemes in the face of so much bitter and violent opposition.
