Free George Stephenson by Hunter Davies Page A

Stephenson of Newcastle, particularly of his Locomotive Engines.’
    It’s interesting to note, despite the difficulty of stage coach travel, how quickly engineers in Russia, France, Germany and elsewhere got to know about scientific developments. Stephenson had begun to corner the market in the use and production of colliery locomotives, all of it rather primitive and experimental, but there were enough people still interested in the subject to come and see his progress. He was late in the field, compared with someone like Trevithick. When George started in 1814 others had given up, leaving clues for him to see but no definite guidelines. From 1814 until 1826 there are no records of anyone but Stephenson building any new locomotive engines. He produced his at such speed, each with a new development, that others waited and wondered, most either refusing to believe the stories they were hearing or convinced that it would all end in disaster once again.
    Despite the mass of books and pamphlets which have been produced on the early history of railways, these vital years in George’s development, when he produced those first sixteen engines at Killingworth, are still shrouded in some mystery. From 1814, with the appearance of Blucher , to around 1820 or 1821, no one has yet been able to tabulate exactly the stages in George’s locomotive designs. Years later he did go on at great length about his Killingworth days but it was usually the same old story about his hard struggle with everyone against him. He himself seems to have forgotten how each process was reached. It was all a matter of native, brilliant genius, according to George in later life, and according to the Smiles’ accounts. In reality, his progress was probably extremely rough and ready, like his safety lamp experiments, with a lot of hammering one way, then hammering the other way, till he found one way went better than another.
    It was a period when George was on his own, a rather eccentric colliery engineer working away in comparative isolation. We have to rely on foreign visitors for odd details and reports, foreign engineers doing their technical grand tour, drawn to Killingworth by rumours of this odd character and his odd machines, hoping for an amusing interlude before going on to study the work of the truly great engineers of the day like Rennie and Telford, who were well known throughout Europe.
    Yet there was a large lay audience willing to watch any new spectacle, if just for the chance of seeing a few accidents or other excitements. Crowds had always gathered for any new or strange inventions. To cater for the better informed of the general public there began to appear on the scene several writers propagating and publicising the ideas of railways, in England, Europe and in North America. Fortunately for Stephenson, one of them was his closest friend and supporter, Nicholas Wood. He kept minute records of all George’s experiments, lectured and wrote extensively on the subject, but it wasn’t until 1825 that he produced his massive Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads .
    Stephenson was fortunate in several ways, though he was the last person to admit such a thing. He was able to build on what had gone before, to see the mistakes of others and correct them. He was fortunate in being born in the north east, the hub of colliery wagon ways and the home of many locomotive pioneers whose experiments he must have seen at first hand. And most important of all, he benefited from the many improvements in boilers and rails which others had made in the ten years or so since Trevithick’s first attempts.
    However, the vast majority of those who did know about locomotives looked upon them as a purely local phenomenon, a specialist means of private transportation, confined completely to the colliery areas. Until 1825 nobody had attempted a public railway using locomotives. Until 1825 Stephenson’s ten years of continuous locomotive