George Stephenson (6 page)

No man can more highly appreciate your merits than I do … but at the same time I can never allow any meritorious Individual to be cried down because he happens to be placed in an obscure situation – on the contrary, that very circumstance will operate in me as an additional stimulus to endeavour to protect him against all overbearing efforts.

Sir Humphrey kept quiet after this, but he went to his grave in 1829 still considering Stephenson a cheat. His biographer Dr Paris in 1831 kept up the accusations: ‘It will be hereafter scarcely believed that an invention so eminently scientific, and which could never have been derived but from the sterling treasury of science, should have been claimed on behalf of an engine-wright of the name of Stephenson – a person not even possessing a knowledge of the elements of chemistry.' At least by 1831 they were spelling his name correctly.

Goodness knows how many eminent members of the Establishment believed what Davy told them, in public and in private, and probably remembered it for years afterwards, casting doubts whenever they could about Stephenson's later inventions and successes.

The row went on for a good many years after the report was issued. It had the effect for a time of swinging the accusations the other way – with Davy being accused of having pinched Stephenson's ideas! There were a couple of letters in the local papers which said that ‘Stephenson's work had been clandestinely smuggled to Sir H. Davy.' Poor old Rev Hodgson nearly had apoplexy at this, springing to Davy's defence once more and calling it a ‘calumny on his character'.

Few of the letters were as vitriolic or as self-righteous as Hodgson's and luckily not anywhere as verbose. The great length of these furious newspaper letters strike the modern reader. A few of those which appeared in the
Tyne Mercury
and
Newcastle Courant
were quite amusing, poking fun at all the people in the row. One writer to the editor refers to all ‘the hot air' around and what an ‘explosive' subject it had become. One writer signed himself ‘Simple Wire Gauze'. Another called himself ‘Aladdin'.

The arguments lingered on till 1833 when a House of Commons Committee finally announced that they believed Stephenson's claim to be justified and not a fraud. It said that the principles of the safety lamp had been ‘practically known to Stephenson previously to the period when Davy brought his powerful mind to bear upon the subject'. Honours were then even, though notice how even then a bit of genuflecting to Davy and his powerful mind still lingered on.

Miners of the north east continued to use the Geordy lamp for many decades and the rest of the country the Davy lamp, despite the fact that the top of the Davy lamp tended to become red hot. In 1825 it was said to have caused a fire in a pit near Leeds in which twenty-four men and boys were killed. The Geordy lamp, because of the glass holder round the flame, never overheated.

Samuel Smiles, when he came to write his biography of Stephenson in 1857, naturally took George's side, building up George's deprivations. ‘One was as yet but a colliery engine-wright, scarce raised above the manual-labour class, pursuing his experiments in obscurity; the other was the scientific prodigy of his day, the most brilliant of lecturers and the most popular of philosophers.'

It is hard to know how George himself felt during all the arguments, whether he was simply pleased to be the centre of so much attention, having his humble case fought against the highest scientist in the land; or whether he, like Davy, was absolutely furious and determined to win at all costs. Stephenson's own statements are few but they show a determined calmness which cannot simply be put down to the fact that he was helped in writing them by Wood and others. In these statements he freely admitted that he was aware of others who had gone before him, and had done similar experiments on fire damp, though not of course Sir H. Davy.

It would be interesting to know how he privately felt about the patronising tone adopted by the Grand Allies and others who so nobly sprang to his defence, or whether he was even aware of their smugness and condescension. They wallowed in their own goodness in helping such a poor, inferior workman. Like many fashionable liberals today, displaying their radical chic, these high minded but guilt ridden early Victorian capitalists liked to do and be seen to be doing good for the underprivileged.

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

L
OCOMOTION

T
hree 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 taking 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.