George Stephenson Read online

  It wasn’t uncommon to leave for America – his other sister Anne, who’d married a John Nixon, had recently done so. (She had six children but records of them have not survived, though other branches of the American Nixons did reasonably well.) George settled down again at Killingworth and his career once more moved forward. His capability with every sort of machine, running or repairing them, eventually brought him to the personal attention of the owners of the pit, a group of masters known as the Grand Allies.

  One of George’s more important triumphs, lovingly related by Smiles, concerned a Newcomen pumping machine that had been installed in a new and expensive pit at Killingworth but for a year had given endless trouble. George used to walk across in spare moments and look at it, boasting that he could get it working if asked, though he was just a common brakesman. Eventually when the engine was deemed a failure, the head viewer, Mr Dodds, came personally to George, saying that as everyone else had failed he could try. George’s only condition was very characteristic – he wanted to select his own workmen. The men on the job, all older and more experienced than George, weren’t pleased, but Dodds told him to go ahead. For three days and nights George and his team worked on the machine, taking it to pieces and getting it working, clearing out the water and sending the men to the bottom of the pit for the first time. Dodds presented George with £10 and promised him promotion.

  In 1812, at the age of thirty-one, he was made colliery enginewright, in charge of all the machines, at a salary of £100 a year. He not only looked after the Killingworth machines but built and supervised stationary engines for the Grand Allies at their other pits – even being permitted to do freelance work for other collieries. At the same time, thanks to his increased income, he was devoting his attention to the education of his son Robert, perhaps one of the most interesting phases of his early years at Killingworth.

  For a long time he’d realised that his own lack of education was a serious handicap. Perhaps it was this which brought out the aggressive and dogmatic side of his nature, a quality which never left him. He thought he knew as much as, if not more than, the educated engineers and viewers who were his bosses, though his knowledge had been of necessity picked up by trial and error. He hated them flaunting their academic knowledge and, worst of all, telling him something he didn’t know. At the root of his aggression no doubt lurked an element of inferiority. It wasn’t simply that he wanted Robert to have all the advantages that he himself had missed, the age-old ambition of the self-made man, whether a property tycoon sending his son to Eton, or a jumped-up mechanic wanting his son to go to grammar school. George Stephenson’s other aim was that his son Robert should be the tool of his own self-improvement. Through Robert’s education, he too would be educated.

  Robert was sent first of all to the village school at Long Benton, one and a half miles away from their Killingworth cottage. He was a sickly child, inheriting his mother’s physique rather than his father’s, but he grew up wiry and resolute. The school fees were only fourpence a week and many of the children came barefooted. When he was eleven, Robert was transferred to Dr Bruce’s private academy in Newcastle. This was considered much smarter even than the Newcastle Royal Grammar School. It was very much a middle-class establishment and at first Robert was rather teased for his broad Northumberland accent and his pit village manners. But over the next four years he lost most of his country dialect and could pass for the son of a Tyneside gentleman, like his other school fellows. Later on, Robert was able to mix easily in every society, but his father never lost the broad Northumberland accent, which most people outside the area found on first hearing almost unintelligible.

  The round trip to Newcastle was ten miles, rather a long walk for a thin limbed, delicate looking boy, so George bought him a cuddy. He needed a horse not just to save his legs but for all the books he was constantly bringing home. Along with his son, George was struggling with the basic elements of chemistry and physics. Robert, a far better reader than his father, would read aloud the theoretical principles, and then, together, they would discuss and come to an understanding of them. Having done that they would try some practical experiments. The pair of them constructed a sundial which actually worked, building it above the front door of their Killingworth cottage, where it can still be seen.

  When they exhausted the school syllabus George enrolled Robert in Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society at a fee of three guineas a year. Together they moved onto more advanced books. When the books were too valuable for Robert to be allowed to take home on his donkey he was instructed to copy out the vital bits, especially any diagrams, and take them home for his father. One of the secretaries at the Lit and Phil, realising what an eager young member Robert was becoming, went out of his way to help him, recommending books and making instruments available. Eventually George plucked up courage to go into Newcastle himself and enter the imposing building with his son. Robert would easily have developed on his own, thanks to his expensive schooling, but without Robert, George might have taken years to gain the theoretical knowledge. George’s nature, being proud and self-opinionated, made it hard for him to learn from another adult. But with his son, so much his junior in years, they could study and work together with Robert almost unaware that in effect he was being used to teach his father.

  Robert’s education shows how relatively well off George had become. The four years’ schooling at Dr Bruce’s Academy came to just £40 in all, a large amount for an ordinary working man. George’s basic annual salary was still £100 but every year he was decreasing his Killingworth hours and increasing his freelance work. He devised some stationary engines for underground work which so successfully hauled the coal carts that his masters at Killingworth, the Grand Allies, were able to reduce the number of pit ponies from a hundred to fifteen. They allowed him, at his own profit, to do the same for other colliery owners.

  He was endlessly working on other less commercial inventions at work and at home. He built a clockwork scarecrow in his garden whose arms flew round and round, scaring all the birds and most of the neighbours. He invented a way of fastening his garden door so that he could get through it but nobody else could. He designed a baby’s cradle which automatically rocked by means of the smoke from the chimney stack. (It’s not clear how this worked, but Samuel Smiles says the women of the village remembered his ingenious invention for many years.) He devised a lamp which burned under water and he amused a local colliery owner’s family by going into their fish ponds at night and using his lamp to catch all their fish. His cottage was crammed with all sorts of finished and half-finished models and inventions. He was obsessed at the time, as so many of the new mechanics were, by the idea of perpetual motion, a problem which had baffled inventors for centuries. But even George couldn’t solve that one.

  He was becoming known throughout the Tyneside pits by owners and managers as a highly skilled engineer with an inventive turn of mind, a rather strong-minded, obstinate character, full of strange facts and weird theories, but an enthusiast, an optimist who was confident he would get things done. He’d done very well for himself, having risen from assistant fireman to enginewright in just sixteen years, and he was now riding round on a company horse, one of the perks that went with being made enginewright. His share of the cottage was now four large rooms. All the same, he was still very much a working man in his manner and life style, unchanged and unaffected, despite his new income and his new position. He would still take part in daft bets of strength such as throwing hammers or lifting weights, along with any pit lads who cared to challenge him.

  When Robert left school George apprenticed him to his friend Nicholas Wood, who’d now become head viewer at Killingworth. Although some years younger than George, Nicholas Wood had recognised George’s talents from the moment he arrived at Killingworth as an underviewer. They’d progressed together, helping each other, though Wood was in every way the professional, highly educated and cultured engineer, with George his rough and ready pr
otégé. It was a good start for Robert, being apprenticed to one of the best men in the area. From an early age there were signs that he had inherited his father’s inventiveness and he was obviously going to be much more than his father’s tool. Unbeknown to his father, he once tried an electricity experiment on his own, having read a paper on harnessing lightning. He almost set fire to the cottage but fortunately the only damage was to his donkey, who was knocked over by the electric shock.

  Not long after Robert had started his apprenticeship in 1818, when he was fifteen, his Aunt Nelly left home and got married. It looks very much as if she’d deliberately stayed on, acting as his locum mother, until his education was over. There is not the slightest indication that George had any relations with other women during the thirteen years since Fanny had died, not that one would expect Samuel Smiles to breathe a word of such things. He was certainly attractive to women, big and strong, full of energy, enthusiasm and excitement, always good company as long as you didn’t cross him. But throughout his life he appears to have thrown all his energies into his work. Just over a year after his sister Nelly left, George remarried. His bride this time was Elizabeth Hindmarsh, known as Betty, the farmer’s daughter who hadn’t been allowed to marry him, all those years ago. She had stuck to her vow and had never married anyone else.

  George was now an excellent catch. He was no longer a poor, obscure run-of-the-mill brakesman, lucky to make £50 a year. He was now an important enginewright, earning over £200 a year, with a large cottage, several hundred pounds in savings and investments, turning down offers and jobs all over Tyneside. He was highly thought of by his employers, Lord Ravensworth and the other Grand Allies, the most prosperous owners in the north east. This esteem was due to the fact that his inventions were saving so much money. The new mechanics, like George, were the elite workers of the day, the makers and menders of the machines which made the industrial revolution. They were much better paid than their fellow workers, with more responsibility. The owners bowed to their superior technical knowledge and gave them great freedom.

  For his second marriage in 1820 he went back to the same church at Newburn, but this time he had the full treatment. The vicar himself officiated and he had the church’s new violin quartet playing for the ceremony. (It played at all such ceremonies, for those who could afford it, till the church got an organ in 1834.) The marriage was by special license as he could now afford to pay to have things speeded up. (The vicar who married him, Rev J. Edmonson, came to a tragic end twelve years later. Along with sixty-six other parishioners, he died in an outbreak of cholera which swept the parish of Newburn in January, 1832).

  George’s signature in the marriage register book this time is strong and bold, ending with a flourish and not a trace of a smudge. He signed himself ‘Geo’ not George. Very businesslike. By this time he was indeed a businesslike man for by now he had begun to solve the many problems of successfully running steam engines which moved of their own accord, or locomotives as they were being called, and had taken out patents to prove it.

  George Stephenson didn’t invent locomotives, though in popular folklore he has been credited with doing so for the last hundred and fifty years. (Even G.M. Trevelyan, in his great classic Social History of England, describes George as ‘the man who invented the locomotive’.) Before proceeding to what he did with locomotives, let us go back for a moment, leaving George newly married and newly affluent, travelling round on his company cuddy inspecting his engines, to investigate something which he did invent, something which, for one hundred and fifty years, popular folklore has completely credited to someone else. Every schoolboy has heard of the Davy lamp. How many know that George Stephenson got there first? It’s a story with all the right Victorian morals.

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  THE SAFETY LAMP ROW

  The early nineteenth century was a great period for scientific discoveries and inventions. Botanists were busy cataloguing the flora and fauna, geologists were looking at the nature of soil and rocks and there was similar activity in astronomy, optics, zoology, physics and chemistry. All this activity was being watched and marvelled at by an increasingly large and knowledgeable public. For the first time, science had become a public activity rather than a private, elitist affair.

  The immense sales of the new encyclopaedias, particularly the Edinburgh-based Encyclopaedia Britannica, and of the new scientific and mechanical journals, helped to keep a wide audience up to date. The rise of the many scientific societies in every town in the land shows how deep was the desire for knowledge. At the top end was the Royal Society, actively supported and patronised by the nobility and the Establishment. At the other end were the provincial literary and philosophic societies modelled on the original Manchester Society which had been founded in 1781. Newcastle’s, founded 1793, was where George Stephenson and his son Robert picked up their early bits of learning. By 1815, almost every town of importance had its Lit. and Phil.

  The two most gifted scientists of the day were John Dalton and Humphrey Davy. Both of them received their early scientific training at their local Lit. and Phil. Socs. – Dalton in Manchester and Davy in Bristol. Dalton stayed in Manchester working on his theory of atoms, teaching and living a hand to mouth existence, avoiding popular acclaim.

  Davy, on the other hand, loved the limelight. His rise to fame and fortune was known by all. From fairly modest beginnings in Cornwall, the son of a Methodist preacher, he trained as a scientist in Bristol, then moved to London to lecture at the Royal Institution. He did a long series of experiments which resulted in the discovery of sodium, potassium, magnesium and other metals as well as chlorine which was of great use in the rapidly expanding textile industry for bleaching purposes. He developed forms of fertiliser for use in agriculture. One of the things about Davy which made him such a popular figure was that, unlike Dalton, almost all his work was of practical use. No wonder the Victorians painted his career so glowingly. Not since Newton had a scientist captured the nation’s imagination. He was showered with wealth and honours, first a knighthood and then a baronetcy. In 1815 he was by far and away the most powerful and most honoured scientist in the land and in 1820 became President of the Royal Society. As a brilliant public speaker, he was courted and fêted wherever he went. In public esteem, only Wellington, thanks to Waterloo, was more loved and admired.

  It wasn’t surprising therefore that in August 1815 when a committee of north-eastern coal owners decided to find someone to solve a scientific problem for them, they should turn to Sir Humphrey. The call went out, as if in a Hollywood thriller, and the great man agreed to come.

  The problem was gas explosions. Mining is a dangerous enough occupation at the best of times but by carrying with them a naked light – either candles or oil lamps – miners were constantly in danger of being blown to pieces every time they came across a whiff of any of the dangerous gases which are present in almost every coal seam. The problem had been there for decades but with the expansion of the coal industry and the increase in size and depth of every coal mine death had similarly increased in scale.

  In Killingworth colliery, where George Stephenson was working, there had been many deaths through gas explosions. Ten men died in 1806, not long after George had become a brakesman. Twelve more were killed in 1809. Every pit in the country had similar tragedies. The worst occurred in 1812 at the nearby Felling pit in Gateshead, in which ninety men and boys died, burned to death or suffocated by an explosion of fire damp, as it was known at the time. The whole country was shocked.

  Sir Humphrey came up to Newcastle on 24 August 1815, aware of the nation’s feelings and in response to the appeal of the owners. He looked around a few pits and then returned to London to consider the problem. On 9 November 1815, he re-emerged to give his historic paper to the Royal Society in London, On the Fire-Damp of Coal Mines and on Methods of lighting the Aline so as to prevent its explosion. In under three months, he had inspected, diagnosed and corrected the problem. This led to the production of h
is Davy Lamp which was to ensure him a place in history.

  But, and here the plot thickens, was it the first miners’ safety lamp? Could an unknown, uneducated, semi-literate, self-taught enginewright called George Stephenson possibly have beaten him to it?

  It would be surprising if George had not had a go at solving the problem of lighting a pit without causing instant death. He had witnessed enough tragedies at first hand and we know that over the last ten years his inventive mind had been turned towards much more complicated problems. He was by now well into the problem of building an efficient steam locomotive, but he was as aware as anyone of the need to tame the problem of fire damp. By a coincidence, about the same time Davy was working on the problem in London, George Stephenson was doing the same at Killingworth, working by trial and error, experimenting in the pit and at his cottage. He too came up with a safety lamp – identical in principle to Davy’s.

  On 5 December 1815, George Stephenson’s invention was publicly explained at a meeting at the Lit. and Phil. in Newcastle, Over eighty members turned up to watch and listen. It was George’s first public appearance, the first occasion on which he was called upon to make a speech, and he did not relish the prospect. To the end of his life he was very poor at public speaking. He got his friend Nicholas Wood to act as interpreter and frontman. George stood to the side, out of sight, while the demonstration started, but when he saw slight mistakes creeping in, George couldn’t bear it any longer. He appeared from the wings and took over in his strong Northumbrian accent, giving a blow by blow history of his invention. He had with him several bladders full of hydrogen, collected from the Killingworth mine, and he demonstrated by lighting his lamp that it was perfectly safe.