George Stephenson (7 page)

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.

There were many other lesser known colliery engineers working away, mostly unsuccessfully, trying to produce their own forms of steam locomotive. In Whitehaven, where the local collieries had been amongst the first to use the Newcomen engine, a locomotive was built in 1812, known locally as the Iron Horse, but this, like so many before and after, tore up the rails.

News travelled fast between engineers in rival collieries and when it didn't, owners had no scruples about sending out spies. Once when Sir James Lowther, owner of the Whitehaven mines, thought that the north-eastern lads had got ahead he sent across his leading engineer, Carlisle Spedding, disguised as an ordinary pitman going under the name of Dan. Unfortunately he was injured by an explosion of fire damp. Sir James naturally ordered the best medical advice in Newcastle to attend him – which was when it was realised Dan was no ordinary miner.

The north east remained the home of most new developments in the mining industry and it was here in 1812 that William Chapman invented a self-hauling chain engine which pulled itself along. William Brunton, another north-easterner, produced an even more eccentric engine which ‘walked', at least it trundled itself along on sticking-out legs. Neither was successful. By around 1813 most colliery engineers were beginning to give up, sticking in the main to horses plus fixed engines for the hills. Even as late as 1830 the mainstream of the engineering and scientific professions were of the opinion that the iron horse had no future.

They had good reasons for thinking so. Since Trevithick's first attempts nobody had really solved the many technical problems – certainly not in one engine. The basic problems were the lack of sufficient steam power, the jerky motion caused by the roughly made gear wheels which made most engines fall to pieces, the difficulty of regulating the valves and gears to put an engine into reverse, the overall heaviness of the machine, its slowness, the brittle nature of the cast iron rails. It needed a man of vision and action and perseverance even to attempt to solve any one of these problems.

In 1814 George Stephenson was thirty-three years old. He had worked his way slowly but steadily up to the position of enginewright in charge of the engine work for his employers, the Grand Allies. He was living in his cottage at West Moor, beside Killingworth Colliery. His son Robert, who was still being looked after by his sister, was eleven and by now had just started at Dr Bruce's Academy.

Other local colliery owners, like the Brandlings and Blackett, had already allowed their enginewrights and viewers to experiment with a locomotive, so it was natural that the Grand Allies should do the same. It was in 1814 that George Stephenson produced his first locomotive, a little late considering so many local engineers had already tried, and a little bit like most of the locomotives they'd already produced. But a commendable effort, considering he was a late starter, a self-taught engineer, with none of their educational advantages.

He called his engine the
Blucher
, which one must presume took its name from the Prussian general who was at that time helping the British to turn the tide against Napoleon. All the same, it's a surprisingly foreign name for Stephenson to have given his first engine. Perhaps it was christened by Sir Thomas Liddell, the Grand Ally who encouraged Stephenson to start its construction. In later Northumbrian dialect, ‘Blucher' became a term of passing contempt for anything big, awkward and brutish.

It first ran on 25 July 1814, on the Killingworth colliery wagon way outside Stephenson's West Moor cottage, and quite a crowd turned up to watch its progress. No contemporary drawings exist but Nicholas Wood, who wrote about it later, described it as having two cylinders, a boiler eight feet long, flanged wheels and ran on smooth edged rails. It pulled eight wagons, weighing thirty tons, at the rate of four miles an hour.

George's elder brother James was the first driver of the
Blucher
. He seems to have followed George round the various collieries as George progressed over the years. George named one of his stationary engines the
Jimmy
after him. Like George, he lived in a cottage beside the Killingworth wagon way with his wife, a large, buxom woman called Jinnie. According to one Thomas Summerside, who knew the Stephensons at the time and some fifty years later wrote a delightful memoir of those early days,
Blucher
used to break down frequently on its journey up and down the line. Jinnie was usually the one called out to give it a shove, ‘Come away Jinnie and put your shoulder to her,' so her husband would shout. Then she would go back to her work beside the track, cutting the grass to feed her cows. She must have been a busy woman. It was also her job first thing in the morning at four o'clock to get up and light a fire in
Blucher
's grate to get the steam going.

The
Blucher
was constantly developed as George Stephenson thought of new improvements. To try and get up more power and to lessen the noise of the escaping steam he turned the exhaust into the chimney and produced what became known as the blast pipe. Arguments raged for many years amongst the experts about whether this was Stephenson's own idea, or if he had seen someone else doing it, or whether perhaps he'd discovered it by accident, not realising it would increase the steam power.

Other developments on
Blucher
included new types of valves and the introduction of connecting rods on the wheels which solved some of the problems caused by having so many roughly made gears. This was the first use of such a system, a system which became a familiar sight on all steam engines for decades. Stephenson himself later abandoned it.