George Stephenson

• 1. Introduction

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  George Stephenson could not read or write until he was 18 years old. Born in 1781 to parents who were both illiterate, he grew up in a colliery cottage where there was no money for schooling. His father worked the pumping engine at Wylam Colliery for a very low wage. And yet the Victorians would come to hold this man up as a model of diligent application and a thirst for improvement. They would call him the Father of Railways. How does a boy who paid out of his own pocket for night school end up choosing the rail gauge that most of the world's railways still use today? How does an uneducated colliery worker come to drive the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on a public line? And why, after all his triumphs, did he carry a lifelong distrust of London's scientific experts? The answers run through coal pits, courtrooms, a contested safety lamp, and a peat bog said to be bottomless.

• 2. Pit Lad To Enginewright

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  At 17, Stephenson became an engineman at Water Row Pit in Newburn, near the village where he was born nine miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. He understood what schooling could give him and paid to attend night school, learning reading, writing and arithmetic. In 1801 he moved on to Black Callerton Colliery south of Ponteland, working as a brakesman who controlled the winding gear at the pit. To stretch his income he made shoes and mended clocks. After he and Frances Henderson married in 1802, they lived in a single room of a cottage at Willington Quay, east of Newcastle. The family kept moving with the work. In 1804 they settled at Dial Cottage at West Moor, near Killingworth, where George took a brakesman's job at Killingworth Pit. The turning point came in 1811. The pumping engine at High Pit, Killingworth, was running badly, and Stephenson offered to fix it. He succeeded so completely that he was promoted to enginewright for the Killingworth collieries, responsible for maintaining and repairing every colliery engine, and he became an expert in steam-driven machinery.

• 3. The Contested Lamp

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  In 1815, mine explosions caused by naked flames pushed Stephenson to experiment with a safety lamp that could burn in a gaseous atmosphere without igniting it. By trial and error, he built a lamp in which air entered through tiny holes too small for the flames to pass back through. At the same time, the eminent Cornish scientist Humphry Davy was working on the same problem. A month before Davy presented his design to the Royal Society, Stephenson took his own lamp down Killingworth Colliery and held it before a fissure venting firedamp, with two witnesses watching. The two designs differed. Davy surrounded his flame with a screen of gauze, while Stephenson's prototype used a perforated plate around a glass cylinder. The reward for the work was wildly unequal. Davy was awarded £2000, while Stephenson was accused of stealing the idea, because critics doubted an uneducated man could have produced a lamp by any approved scientific method. A local committee of enquiry exonerated him, proved he had worked separately to make the Geordie Lamp, and awarded him £1,000. Davy and his supporters refused to accept the findings. In 1833 a House of Commons committee found that Stephenson had equal claim to having invented the safety lamp, but Davy went to his grave believing his idea had been stolen. The author L.T.C. Rolt records that opinion split on which lamp was better. At Oaks Colliery in Barnsley, where both were in use, a sudden influx of gas turned the tops of the Davy Lamps red hot, while the Geordie Lamps simply went out. The whole episode left Stephenson with a lasting distrust of London-based theoretical experts. There is even a theory that the name of the Geordie Lamp attached itself to the pit men of the North East, so that by 1866 any native of Newcastle could be called a Geordie.

• 4. Building The First Engines

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  Stephenson designed his first locomotive in 1814, a travelling engine for hauling coal on the Killingworth wagonway. He named it Blücher, after the Prussian general Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, whose rapid march in support of Wellington at Waterloo had been suggested as the inspiration. Blücher was modelled on Matthew Murray's locomotive Willington, which George studied at Kenton and Coxlodge colliery, and it was built in the workshop behind his home, Dial Cottage. The engine could haul 30 tons of coal up a hill at 4 miles per hour. It was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive, its traction depending on contact between its flanged wheels and the rail. He was said to have produced 16 locomotives at Killingworth, though no convincing full list of them has been assembled. The early machines exposed a stubborn problem. The new engines were too heavy for wooden rails or plate-way, and the cast iron of early edge rails was excessively brittle. A six-wheeled locomotive built for the Kilmarnock and Troon Railway in 1817 was withdrawn after damaging the cast-iron rails. Another, supplied to Scott's Pit railroad at Llansamlet near Swansea in 1819, was withdrawn too, apparently under-boilered and again damaging the track. Working with William Losh, Stephenson improved the cast-iron edge rails to reduce breakage. According to Rolt, he tried a steam spring to cushion the engine's weight, then moved toward distributing that weight across a number of wheels. He also drew on the earlier work of Richard Trevithick, the Cornishman credited with testing the Puffing Devil on the 24th of December 1801, who later visited Tyneside and built an engine there for a mine-owner, inspiring several local men to design their own.

• 5. Stockton And Darlington

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  In 1821 a parliamentary bill was passed to build the Stockton and Darlington Railway, a 25-mile line connecting collieries near Bishop Auckland to the River Tees at Stockton, passing through Darlington. The original plan was to use horses to draw coal carts, but after company director Edward Pease met Stephenson, he agreed to change the plans. Stephenson surveyed the line that year, assisted by his 18-year-old son Robert, and construction began. The line needed a manufacturer for its locomotives. Pease and Stephenson had jointly set up a company in Newcastle, Robert Stephenson and Company, with George's son Robert as managing director and Michael Longridge of Bedlington Ironworks as a fourth partner. In September 1825 the Forth Street works completed the first locomotive, originally named Active and renamed Locomotion, followed by Hope, Diligence and Black Diamond. The railway opened on the 27th of September 1825. Driven by Stephenson himself, Locomotion hauled an 80-ton load of coal and flour nine miles in two hours, reaching 15 miles per hour on one stretch. A purpose-built passenger car, Experiment, carried dignitaries on the opening journey. It was the first time passenger traffic had run on a steam locomotive railway. For the rails, Stephenson chose wrought-iron produced by John Birkinshaw at the Bedlington Ironworks, which could be made in longer lengths and was less liable to crack than cast iron. The choice cost him personally. William Losh believed he had an agreement to supply cast-iron rails, and Stephenson's decision caused a permanent rift between them. The gauge Stephenson chose for the line was 4 ft, which would go on to be adopted as the standard gauge for railways across Britain and the world.

• 6. Liverpool And Manchester

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  Experiments at Killingworth had taught Stephenson that a gradient as slight as 1 in 260 consumed half a locomotive's power. He concluded that railways should be kept as level as possible, and he carried that principle into difficult cuttings, embankments and stone viaducts on the Bolton and Leigh and the Liverpool and Manchester railways. The path to building the Liverpool and Manchester was not smooth. Defective surveying of the original route, caused by hostility from some landowners, left Stephenson struggling under cross-examination by Edward Hall Alderson during Parliamentary scrutiny. The first bill was rejected, and a revised alignment had to be submitted and passed in a later session. That revised route forced him to cross Chat Moss, an apparently bottomless peat bog. Stephenson floated the line across it, laying a foundation of heather and branches topped with stones, a method similar to one used by John Metcalf on roads through the Pennines. As the line neared completion in 1829, its directors held the Rainhill Trials in October to choose its locomotives. Entries could weigh no more than six tons and had to travel a total of 60 miles along the track. Stephenson's entry, Rocket, won and became famous. Robert, who had worked in South America from 1824 to 1827, handled Rocket's detailed design while in constant postal contact with his father. One key innovation, a fire-tube boiler invented by the French engineer Marc Seguin, was suggested by Henry Booth, treasurer of the line. The opening ceremony on the 15th of September 1830 drew the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and began with a procession of eight trains from Liverpool. George led the parade driving Northumbrian, with Robert driving Phoenix and Joseph Locke driving Rocket. The day was marred by tragedy. William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was struck by Rocket, and though Stephenson rushed him to Eccles by train, he died of his injuries. That same year saw the grand opening of the Rainhill skew bridge, the first to cross a railway at an angle, built as two overlapping flat planes with the arch bricks laid at an angle to create a strengthening spiral effect. The bridge still carries the A57 over the line at Rainhill station today.

• 7. Coal And Caution

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  George Stephenson moved to Alton Grange in Leicestershire in 1830 to consult on the Leicester and Swannington Railway, a line meant to carry coal from the county's western fields to Leicester. When its promoters, William Stenson and John Ellis, struggled to raise capital because local money was tied up in canals, Stephenson invested £2,500 himself and raised the rest through his Liverpool connections. His son Robert became chief engineer, and the first part of the line opened in 1832. Stephenson had an eye for what the railway would be worth. When the Snibston estate came up for auction beside the proposed route, he saw that its coal reserves and its nearness to the rail link would let him undercut coal then brought to Leicester by canal from Derbyshire. Using a midlands mining method called tubbing to reach the deep seams, his mine delivered the first rail cars of coal into Leicester and saved the city some £40,000 a year. The decade that followed was the busiest of his life, as railway promoters besieged him with requests. American railroad builders came to Newcastle to learn from him, buying the first dozen or so locomotives from the Stephenson shops. But his conservative views slowed him. Believing locomotives less capable than his successors did, he favoured circuitous, costly routes, preferring a longer sea-level line via Ulverston and Whitehaven to Joseph Locke's direct route over Shap, which was the one actually built. His casual approach to estimating costs caught up with him on the Grand Junction Railway, where he and Locke each took half the line. The board found his estimates and organising ability inferior, and his resignation opened a rift with Locke that never healed. In time he became a reassuring name rather than a cutting-edge adviser, and in 1847 he was made the first president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

• 8. The Man Behind The Engines

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  George Stephenson married three times, and his first courtship was refused on grounds of class. He had met Elizabeth Hindmarsh, a farmer's daughter from Black Callerton, secretly in her orchard, but her father rejected the match because of his lowly status as a miner. He turned next to Anne Henderson, who rejected him, and then to her sister Frances, nine years his senior, whom he married at Newburn Church on the 28th of November 1802. Frances died, probably of tuberculosis, after the loss of their infant daughter, and while George worked in Scotland their son Robert was raised by neighbours and then by George's unmarried sister Eleanor. Wealth eventually reopened the door that class had closed. On the 29th of March 1820, a much richer Stephenson married Elizabeth Hindmarsh, the woman from the orchard, at Newburn. The marriage seems to have been happy but childless, and she died on the 3rd of August 1845. His third marriage, to his housekeeper Ellen Gregory, took place on the 11th of January 1848 at St Chad's Church in Shrewsbury. Seven months later he contracted pleurisy and died, aged 67, at noon on the 12th of August 1848 at Tapton House in Chesterfield. He was buried at Holy Trinity Church, Chesterfield, beside his second wife. Rolt describes him as a generous man who financially supported the families of workers who had died in his employment. He was also a keen gardener, building hothouses at Tapton House and growing exotic fruits and vegetables in a not too friendly rivalry with Joseph Paxton of nearby Chatsworth House, twice beating the master of the craft. His legacy carried far beyond his lifetime. In 2002 he was placed at number 65 in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons, and from 1990 until 2003 his portrait appeared on the reverse of the Bank of England's Series E five pound note, shown alongside the Rocket and the Skerne Bridge.