Robert Stephenson

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Stephenson was born on the 16th of October 1803 at Willington Quay, east of Newcastle upon Tyne, to a father who would become known to history as the Father of Railways. His mother Fanny died when Robert was just two years old. His father George, who had received little formal education himself, was fiercely determined that his son would have one. He sent the eleven-year-old Robert to the Percy Street Academy in Newcastle, and the boy repaid that faith by becoming a member of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, borrowing books for both himself and his father to read. In the evenings they worked together on designs for steam engines. In 1816 they made a sundial together that still sits above the cottage door.

  By the time Robert died on the 12th of October 1859, just days short of his fifty-sixth birthday, he had been involved in the construction of a third of England's railway system, designed some of the most daring bridges ever built, represented Whitby in Parliament, and sailed a hundred-ton yacht he called the house that has no knocker. The questions that carry us through his story are less about what he built and more about who he was: a son working in a famous father's shadow, an engineer who lost his wife and his health in the same decade, a man who twice turned down a British knighthood yet accepted honours from Belgium, France, and Norway.

• 2. The Making of an Engineer

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  After leaving school in 1819, Robert was apprenticed to Nicholas Wood, the mining engineer who managed Killingworth colliery. Unable to afford a mining compass, he made one himself. He would later use that same compass to survey the High Level Bridge in Newcastle.

  In 1821, Wood released the eighteen-year-old Robert so he could assist his father in surveying the Bishop Auckland area for Edward Pease, who wanted a railway to carry coal to Darlington and Stockton-on-Tees. Robert was showing symptoms of tuberculosis at the time, and his work underground was genuinely hazardous: he was down West Moor Pit when there was an underground explosion.

  His father, persuaded mainly by the Scottish engineer Robert Bald, agreed that Robert should spend time at Edinburgh University. George could have afforded a full degree course at Cambridge, but he wanted his son to work for his living rather than become a gentleman, so he settled for a short academic year between October 1822 and April 1823. Before that, Robert helped William James survey the route of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

  In June 1823, the Stephensons and Pease opened Robert Stephenson and Company on Forth Street in Newcastle to build locomotives, with Pease lending Robert £500 to buy his share. George was busy supervising the construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, so Robert was placed in charge of the works at a salary of £200 per annum. He was not yet twenty years old.

• 3. South American Detour

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  On the 18th of June 1824, Stephenson sailed from Liverpool aboard the Sir William Congreve, bound for South America under a three-year contract. Colombia and Venezuela had only recently broken free from Spanish rule and were still part of the same republic, Gran Colombia. British investors were moving in to reopen the old colonial gold and silver mines, and Robert Stephenson and Company had received orders for steam engines from the Colombian Mining Association.

  To prepare, Robert took Spanish lessons, visited mines in Cornwall, and consulted a doctor who told him the change of climate would be good for his health. After a five-week voyage he arrived at the port of La Guayra in Venezuela on the 23rd of July 1824. He looked into building a breakwater and pier at the harbour and investigated a railway to Caracas, a city sitting nearly a thousand metres above sea level. He concluded a pier at an estimated cost of £6,000 was financially workable; a breakwater or railway was not.

  The mines themselves proved frustrating. The Cornish miners sent to work them drank so heavily that only two-thirds were available on any given day. They refused to accept that a man not raised in Cornwall could know anything about mining.

  When his contract ended on the 16th of July 1827, Stephenson set out for home by a complicated route. At Cartagena he met the railway pioneer Richard Trevithick, who had spent years searching for gold and silver in Peru and Costa Rica and was now stranded without funds. Robert gave him £50 for his passage home. The ship Robert caught to New York first picked up survivors from a shipwreck, then itself sank in a storm. Everyone was saved, but Robert lost his money and luggage. Intrigued by a lifeboat incident he witnessed, in which the captain privately admitted giving a fellow Freemason priority over other passengers, Robert joined the Freemasons in New York. He then walked the five hundred miles to Montreal via Niagara Falls with four other Englishmen, before catching the packet Pacific back across the Atlantic, arriving in Liverpool at the end of November 1827.

• 4. Rocket and the Rainhill Trials

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  The Rainhill trials opened on the 6th of October 1829, and between ten thousand and fifteen thousand people had gathered at the two-mile double-track course to watch. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway's directors had not settled the question of whether to use fixed engines with ropes or steam locomotives, and they staged the trials to find out.

  Five locomotives arrived, but the field quickly thinned. Perseverance had been damaged on the way to Rainhill and did not compete. Cyclops was powered by two horses inside a frame and was not a serious entry. That left Rocket, Novelty, and Sans Pareil. Novelty had been built in London by John Ericsson and John Braithwaite. Sans Pareil came from the Shildon works of Timothy Hackworth, the locomotive supervisor of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

  At ten-thirty on the morning of the 8th of October, Rocket started its seventy-mile journey back and forth across the course. It covered the first thirty-five miles in three hours and twelve minutes, paused fifteen minutes to replenish coke and water, and finished in another two hours and fifty-seven minutes. Its average speed was twelve miles per hour and its top speed exceeded twenty-nine.

  The performance-enhancing innovation of heating water through many small-diameter tubes came to Robert via a letter from his father, who had heard of the idea from Henry Booth and Marc Seguin. Robert fitted twenty-five tubes of three-inch diameter through the boiler. Sans Pareil was found to be overweight but was allowed to run; she burnt fuel at more than three times the rate of Rocket before her boiler ran dry. Novelty failed again the following day and was withdrawn. Rocket was declared the winner, and the L&MR purchased it and ordered four similar locomotives before October was out. Planet followed on the 4th of October 1830, with cylinders placed horizontally under the boiler, and Robert's designs were being shipped to railways in North America.

• 5. London and Birmingham

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  On the 18th of September 1830, George Stephenson and Son signed a contract to survey the route for the London and Birmingham Railway. George recommended the line through Coventry; it was Robert who did most of the work. Robert stood as the engineering authority when a bill was presented to Parliament in 1832. During cross-examination, the angle of a cutting at Tring was questioned. Robert remembered that Thomas Telford had cut through similar ground at Dunstable. He left that night in a post-chaise with Gooch, arrived at the cutting at dawn, and found it matched his proposal exactly. He was back at the company solicitor's office by ten in the morning.

  The bill passed the Commons that year but was defeated in the Lords. After a public campaign and another survey by Robert, the London and Birmingham Railway Act 1833 was obtained on the 6th of May 1833. Robert, not yet thirty years old, signed the contract on the 20th of September 1833 to build a hundred and twelve miles of railway from Camden Town to Birmingham.

  He was awarded £1,500 plus £200 expenses per year. A drawing office holding twenty to thirty draughtsmen was established at the empty Eyre Arms Hotel in St John's Wood. George Parker Bidder, whom Robert had first met at Edinburgh University, joined him there. Engineering difficulties at Primrose Hill Tunnel, Wolverton embankment, and Kilsby Tunnel all required direct labour to complete. The final cost came to £5.5 million against an original estimate of £2.4 million. The railway opened ceremonially on the 15th of September 1838.

• 6. Bridges Over Water

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  The Dee bridge, completed in September 1846, was inspected by the Board of Trade Inspector Major-General Paisley on the 20th of October. On the 24th of May 1847 it gave way under a passenger train. The locomotive and driver made it across; the tender and carriages fell into the river. Five people died. At the inquest at Chester, the foreman of the jury seemed determined to deliver a verdict of manslaughter. Robert was pale and haggard. He had been prepared to admit liability but was persuaded to argue that the cast-iron girder had fractured only because the tender had derailed from a broken wheel. Locke, Charles Vignoles, Gooch, and Kennedy all gave expert evidence on his behalf. A verdict of accidental death was returned. Robert never used long cast-iron girders again.

  The Britannia Bridge presented a different kind of problem. The Admiralty required a single span a hundred feet above the water across the Menai Strait, and the bridge needed to be 1,511 feet long. Robert was inspired by a remarkable accident during the launch of the wrought-iron steamship Prince of Wales, which fell with 110 feet of her hull unsupported but survived undamaged. Working with William Fairbairn and Eaton Hodgkinson, Robert designed a wrought-iron tubular bridge wide enough for a train to pass through. They tested models in 1845 and 1846, then tried the design first on the 400-foot Conwy Bridge. The first Conwy tube was floated into position in March 1848. The Britannia Bridge opened a single line on the 18th of March 1850.

  The High Level Bridge across the Tyne is 1,372 feet long and 146 feet high, made from cast-iron bows held taut by horizontal wrought-iron strings. Queen Victoria formally opened it in September 1849 and offered Robert a knighthood. He declined, as his father had declined a knighthood before him. When the Queen opened the Royal Border Bridge across the Tweed on the 29th of August 1850, Robert sat beside her at the celebratory dinner. He had just been offered a knighthood again, and had declined again.

• 7. Parliament and the Titania

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  Robert was elected unopposed as Member of Parliament for Whitby in August 1847 and held the seat until his death. He was a Conservative with strong protectionist views and opposed free trade. His maiden speech was in support of the Great Exhibition, and with Brunel he became one of its commissioners. He later voiced opposition to the Crimean War but supported the government in January 1855, although the government lost the vote and the prime minister resigned.

  By 1850, Robert had been involved in roughly a third of the country's railway system and had prematurely aged. He was ill with chronic nephritis, then called Bright's Disease. Inventors and promoters followed him everywhere: if he was too ill to receive them at Great George Street, they appeared at his home in Gloucester Square. To escape, in 1850 he commissioned a hundred-ton yacht and named her Titania. Aboard her, he seemed to grow younger, behaving like an excited schoolboy. He became the first member of the Royal Yacht Squadron not from an upper-class background. Titania missed the 1851 Royal Squadron Cup, which America won and which started the America's Cup challenge, but she lost to America in a private race a few days later. The first Titania was destroyed by fire in 1852, and a second, ninety feet long and 184 tons, was built the following year.

  His friendship with Brunel and with Joseph Locke deepened across these years. In 1857, ill and weak, Robert answered Brunel's plea for help during the launch of the SS Great Eastern. He fell from the slipway into riverside mud and continued without an overcoat until the end. The next day he was confined to bed for two weeks with bronchitis. In the Christmas of 1858 he dined with Brunel in Cairo, where Robert was staying aboard Titania or at Shepheard's Hotel. As Robert returned to England in February 1859 and rallied through a difficult summer, Brunel suffered a stroke. Robert sailed to Oslo to attend the opening of the Norwegian Trunk Railway and received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Olaf. He fell ill at the banquet on the 3rd of September and sailed home through a storm that added seven days to the journey. Brunel died the day Robert landed in Suffolk. Robert died on the 12th of October 1859, three years older than his friend.

• 8. Mourning and Legacy

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  Robert left an estate of about £400,000. The Newcastle locomotive works, the Snibston collieries, and £50,000 went to his cousin George Robert Stephenson. George Parker Bidder and the Newcastle Infirmary each received £10,000. A bequest of £2,000 went to the fund from which the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers was anticipating the building of its permanent Newcastle headquarters.

  His funeral was treated as a matter of national mourning. The Queen gave permission for the cortege to pass through Hyde Park, an honour previously reserved for royalty. Two thousand tickets were issued for the service at Westminster Abbey, but three thousand men were admitted. He was buried beside Thomas Telford. Ships on the Thames, Tyne, Wear, and Tees flew their flags at half mast. Work stopped at midday on Tyneside, and the fifteen hundred employees of Robert Stephenson and Company marched through the streets of Newcastle to hold their own memorial service.

  His godson, who was named Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell after him, later became a fellow of the Royal Society. The Victoria Bridge in Montreal, carrying a 6,500-foot tube assembled from twenty-five wrought-iron sections and stretching 8,600 feet in total, was for a time the longest bridge in the world.