George Stephenson Read online

  As for George himself, he might have unconsciously resented the way the nobs rushed round making the most of their protégé. It would help to explain his later antipathy towards the nobility, and many of his subsequent attitudes.

  The whole affair does appear to have been one of those curious historical coincidences, one that Davy just couldn’t believe, which was why he was convinced Stephenson had cheated. It is quite clear that Stephenson was the moral victor.

  The only remaining query is why Stephenson chose to begin his experiments exactly at the same time as Davy. Given Stephenson’s inventive nature, and given that for the previous twenty years he’d been working in the collieries and that he was more than aware of the danger of fire damp, why had he not started experimenting sooner? Why did he wait until August 1815? This was the month when Sir Humphrey Davy was called in. In all the evidence Stephenson is presented as having, quite by chance, started his experiments just a week or two before the day in August that Davy came up to Newcastle.

  There is probably a simple reason. George was too busy elsewhere. He didn’t begin his safety lamp work till it reached the proportions of a national scandal, which was the same reason which brought in Davy. It would explain why he did not become too furious or too involved in all the subsequent arguments and mud slinging. He simply didn’t have the time. It was a huge blow to Davy’s pride but to George the safety lamp was a little one-off job, an interlude from his major preoccupation. Once he had invented his lamp it probably didn’t occupy his thoughts any more than in the past the clay engines had done, or the sundial, or the shoes, or the clocks or the many other small-scale, small-time devices he’d turned his mind to. By now, and throughout the whole of the safety lamp row, he had a much more ambitious, truly scientific project, a project which, as he saw it, could change the world.

  3

  LOCOMOTION

  Three elements came together to form what we now know as railways and George Stephenson invented none of them. The three elements are the wheel, the track and the power. The origins of the wheel are lost forever in antiquity. The origins of laid down rails or tracks are a little clearer, but they too go back for many centuries and no one has ever been able to date them. As for steam power – the first automatic source of power in the history of civilisation – this was by comparison an overnight phenomenon. It is, however, a subject where outsiders must step very carefully. The problem is the superabundance of facts, most of them contradictory. So many people had a hand in steam and as many hands have spent lifetimes trying to sort out the facts. Luckily, the origins of the steam engine have been more than amply covered by at least a hundred books in the last forty years so there is no need to do more than list a few of the more important stages.

  The use of wheels must have been a magical discovery, whenever it was made, greatly reducing the man or oxen-power that was needed to carry any object, but the idea of then running the wheels on rails was an equal stroke of true genius, or perhaps accident. In some ways, there is still a trace of magic. Scientists find it very hard to explain exactly why it is that wheels running on rails can do much more work than wheels running on ordinary ground. The early coal miners certainly didn’t worry about friction or tractive forces when they observed that a horse could pull one cart on a road but manage four or even five carts along a line of rails. It is generally accepted that the use of rails was normal practice in mining from the seventeenth century, though the secret was known in medieval times, probably even Roman.

  Horsedrawn wooden trucks running on wooden boards appear in a drawing of a German mine as early as 1530, but it was in England early in the seventeenth century that the practice became widespread thanks to the sudden increase in coal mining. This was when the rise in the size of London first led to a massive demand for coal from the north east. As the demand increased, new collieries were opened, away from the immediate area of the Tyne and Wear, and horsedrawn wagon ways became the most efficient method of getting the coal to the riverside staithes. There were wagon ways elsewhere in the country, such as Ralph Allen’s wooden wagon way which he had built in 1731 to carry stone from his quarry near Bath to the river Avon, but they were most numerous in the north. By 1781, when George Stephenson was born, the whole of the north east was criss-crossed by a series of colliery wagon ways, all of them privately operated by their owners seeking the quickest way to get the coal to the nearest staithe on the river Tyne.

  There are many recorded incidents of disputes as colliery owners had difficulty finding a way across private estates to get to the staithes. The legal problems caused by these wayleave battles was one of the earliest reasons why collieries started to unite, fighting together to get right of way. It was a factor which led to the formation of the Grand Allies in 1726, the group of colliery owners who employed George Stephenson.

  The opening of a new wagon way was a time for great rejoicing, and crowds of up to ten thousand would turn out to watch the festivities. Sykes, in his 1833 Local Records of Northumberland and Durham, describes several of them:

  1810 (April 23) – This being the day appointed by Simon Temple, Esq, for opening his new colliery at South Shields, the morning was ushered in by the ringing of bells, &c. Eight waggons being loaded with the coals were about one o’clock drawn by one horse from the pit to the staith, preceded by the band of the East York militia, and followed by Mr. Temple, and a long procession of his friends, and two associations of shipwrights under their banners. Seven of the waggons in succession were let down by a new inclined plane to the deck of the ship Maida, belonging to Mr. Temple, which was decorated with colours. The delivery of each was succeeded by a general discharge of cannon, and three times three cheers from the surrounding multitude. The eighth waggon was given to the families of the unfortunate men belonging to South Shields, who were prisoners in France. The company then proceeded to Hylton castle, where one hundred and fifty gentlemen sat down to dinner. The high sheriff of Northumberland, the mayor of Newcastle, several of the chapter of Durham, and most of the magistrates of the district, were at the table. At eight o’clock the ball commenced. At one o’clock, near four hundred ladies and gentlemen sat down to supper; after which dancing recommenced and continued till near six, when all retired highly pleased with the entertainment and respectful attention paid to them.

  All this for some horsedrawn wagons. The next stage was equally respectfully welcomed. This was the principle of self-acting planes, in which the force of loaded wagons going down a hill was used to pull empty wagons up the other side, and it was first employed in the north east in 1798 at Benwell. Around the same time brakes were being introduced and the rails themselves were being greatly improved. Up till the eighteenth century they had been made of wood but by the 1770s cast iron rails had come into use. Experiments were tried with flanges on the rails, to keep the wagons above steady when going at speed round corners, and also with the flanges on the wheels themselves. Most of these improvements in horsedrawn wagon ways were developed in the north east long before George Stephenson started work as a pit boy.

  The development of steam as a source of power for stationary engines had also been developed before Stephenson was born. It was Newcomen in 1712 who had produced the first successful steam pump, a simple up and down beam engine, but it wasn’t till James Watt in 1782 perfected an improved steam engine which could turn wheels that a steam engine could be used for winding and haulage. He invented a steam condenser which enabled his machines to operate at a higher speed, more reliably, and use only a third as much coal as Newcomen’s.

  Once steam had been harnessed as a source of stationary power it was naturally applied to the self-acting planes. Instead of devising suitable downhill places where the force of gravity could do the pulling, steam engines were fixed to the side of the tracks at uphill stretches and with the aid of lengths of ropes and chains they did the pulling. Many colliery wagon ways then became a mixture, with horses still doing the main pulling, but with stationary engines takin
g over for the hard uphill bits and gravity taking over down the inclined planes. This was the position when George first started in the collieries.

  The next important development, the most important of all, was the invention of the locomotive, a steam engine which could run on its own power, and this had nothing to do with George Stephenson. The inventor of this is agreed by all to have been Richard Trevithick, a brilliant Cornishman who had the misfortune to be born just slightly too early for his many ideas to be put into practice.

  Trevithick was born in 1771, ten years before Stephenson, the son of a Cornish tin mine captain, or manager as he would be called today. After school he became an engineer in the local mines and worked on ways of improving Watt’s stationary engines which were then being used in most mines. Under Watt’s patent, Watt got a royalty based on the saving in coal used in his machines compared with Newcomen’s. Trevithick produced several patent steam engines of his own which didn’t please Watt, who looked upon him as his chief rival in the south west of England and tried to bring actions against him.

  Trevithick, like Stephenson, was big and strong and fond of showing off his muscles. He was six feet two inches high and built in proportion and became known as the Cornish giant – as much for his size as his inventions. He threw sledge hammers over the tops of engine houses, then for a follow up he would write his name on a beam six feet from the floor with half a hundredweight hanging from his thumb. In a dispute with another mining engineer, an equally big man, Trevithick picked the man up by the waist and held him upside down, his boots against the ceiling. One might expect such behaviour from a rough uneducated pitman like Stephenson but not from a trained engineer and manager’s son to boot. But Trevithick was a surprising man in every way. He was headstrong, impetuous, moving on constantly from idea to idea, forever being hard up yet giving his money away the minute he had any.

  He completed his first full-sized locomotive in 1801, having been experimenting with some small-scale models for a couple of years. Other engineers in France and England, working independently, had drawn plans for a locomotive and some had even made models but Trevithick was the first who got one working properly. His first locomotive ran on roads, not rails, but it didn’t run for long. While going over a deep gully in the road at Camborne, Cornwall, the steering wheel broke, the locomotive got out of control and it crashed into a house. It doesn’t seem to have affected the high spirits of Trevithick and his friends. One of them, Davies Gilbert, described what happened next. ‘The Parties adjourned to the Hotel and comforted their Hearts with Roast Goose and proper drinks when, forgetful of the Engine, its Water boiled away, the Iron became red hot and nothing that was combustible remained either of the engine or the house.’

  It is difficult to imagine Stephenson allowing such a thing to happen. He would have been down on his hands and knees, taking the machine to pieces and repairing the faults somehow, even if it had taken days, with never a thought for the inner man. But as Mr Smiles has well told us, Stephenson was nothing if not a model of Perseverance.

  Trevithick went back to developing his stationary steam engines but in 1804 he successfully built another locomotive, this time to run on rails, and this time he used it to win a bet. While in Penydaren in South Wales, where he was supplying some stationary engines for the local iron works, a wager was arranged between a local ironmaster and a friend that a steam locomotive couldn’t haul ten tons of iron along the colliery tramway, a distance of some nine miles. The bet was for five hundred guineas. Trevithick won it for the ironmaster, his engine and five wagons carrying seventy men as well as the load of iron. This was a historic occasion in the birth of railways. Though the engine was not used for long, as it was found far too heavy for the rails, it was the forerunner of the locomotives that Stephenson was later to build.

  It is probable that Stephenson heard of Trevithick’s Cornish and Welsh experiments. He was then just a simple brakesman, with another eight years to go before being promoted to enginewright, but news of the Trevithick experiments had definitely reached the north east. Christopher Blackett, the owner of Wylam colliery where Stephenson had first worked, decided to have a Trevithick locomotive built at Gateshead in 1805. Trevithick came up to Tyneside and later boasted that he’d dangled the infant Robert on his knees. (This is highly unlikely considering that Stephenson was an obscure brakesman.) A friend of Stephenson’s, John Steele, helped to build the Trevithick-style engine but there is no record of George ever visiting the Gateshead workshop, though he must have known about it. The engine was tested but never left the foundry. It was found to work well enough mechanically but like the Penydaren engine it tore up the wooden rails. It was Trevithick’s bad luck to have invented a machine long before the world was ready to use it.

  Trevithick did try again in 1808, this time in London, and by a nice coincidence he chose a site not far from what is now Euston Station. He built a circular track and demonstrated a new engine which he called ‘Catch me who can’. Admission to the enclosure was one shilling, which included a ride for those who dared. It received some publicity if only as a piece of eccentricity, but this venture failed once again because the track was not strong enough for the engine.

  After 1808 Trevithick dropped the idea of locomotives without having attempted either to invent a track which could take them or alternatively reduce the weight and clumsiness of his engines. It doesn’t seem to have been in his character to keep going against the odds. Other ideas beckoned and off he went. During the next fifteen years, until he died in 1833, he became involved in many projects which took him to all parts of the world but none of them ever quite came off, though many were later taken up by other inventors. He constructed a barge which had paddle wheels driven by steam, designed a steam hammer, a portable room heater on wheels, a steam rolling mill, an underwater steam-driven dredger. He suggested a mechanical means of refrigeration, a crude form of turbine engine. He worked on a tunnel under the Thames but had to give up when the water came in. (It was Sir Marc Brunel and his son Isambard who later completed the first tunnel under the Thames.) In 1811 he went bankrupt, but by 1814 he was discharged, having paid his debts. In 1816 he set off for Peru with a great fanfare, taking a machine to open up the silver mines, but got caught up in Simon Bolivar’s army. He disappeared into the depths of South America for almost ten years, trying to install his high pressure steam engines, continually being drawn into other dafter and more dangerous exploits.

  One of his last ideas, on his eventual return to England, was to design an enormous column to celebrate the passing of the 1832 Reform Bill. It was to be 1,000 feet high (Nelson’s column, built seventeen years later, is only 185 feet high) with a lift up the middle. Several public meetings were held but the project was finally dropped. When Trevithick died the following year he was penniless and his friends had to pay for the funeral. A tragic, unfulfilled end to one of the most inventive engineers England has ever known. His early high pressure steam engines, which he successfully patented and were used for many decades in mines and factories throughout the country, lived after him, but when he gave up his experiments with locomotives in 1808 it was several years before anyone else had the heart or the energy to try again.

  However, the shortage of horses and the high prices of fodder during the height of the Napoleonic wars renewed interest once again in the possibility of locomotion. Colliery owners, faced with the high cost of running horsedrawn wagon ways, encouraged their more inventive engineers to try again. It was wrongly thought at the time that one of Trevithick’s problems was getting smooth wheels to run on smooth rails. Surely the engine was bound to slide or run off the line at corners? In 1812 John Blenkinsop built a rack locomotive and ran it successfully on a colliery line near Leeds. The driving wheel had cogs which fitted into a rack on the track as it moved forward, thereby keeping it on the track.

  The rack was on one side of the lines which made the engine rather lopsided but Blenkinsop, a local colliery viewer, couldn’t put
the rack down the middle of the track to balance the engine as it would get in the way of the horses who were still the main pulling power. Despite its clumsiness and slowness, the Blenkinsop rack locomotive ran for several years and therefore must be said to be the first commercially successful locomotive. Blenkinsop sent one of his to work on the Tyne. It wasn’t a success and was soon taken off but it is thought, once again, that George Stephenson must have watched it at work.

  Blenkinsop paid a royalty of £30 to Trevithick for the use of some of his boiler patents but the rack idea seems to have been his own. It caused a good deal of interest, at home and abroad. In 1815 a French engineer who had seen it, published a detailed description and the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, later the Tsar, was so impressed when he visited the colliery on a tour of England that he had a model of the locomotive sent to him in Russia. All the same, no other engineers seem to have followed up Blenkinsop’s experiments, mainly because of the expense of installing the rack rails. None of them survive today.

  In 1813 the story moves back to the north-east, though even Blenkinsop’s development had north-east connections because his colliery owners, the Brandlings, were a Northumberland family. In that year William Hedley, viewer of Wylam colliery, successfully built a smooth wheeled engine. The wagon way at Wylam had now been laid with cast iron rails, replacing the wooden ones of Stephenson’s boyhood, and Hedley’s engines ran successfully for many years. Two of his later ones, dating from 1828 and 1832, were called the Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly and are the two earliest locomotives in existence. (One is in London at the Science Museum and the other is at the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh.) Hedley’s supporters claimed he’d solved the problem of smooth wheels running on smooth tracks, therefore making Blenkinsop’s rack idea obsolescent, but of course Trevithick at Penydaren had done the same nine years earlier.