George Stephenson

English engineer

• Born: June 9, 1781
• Birthplace: Wylam, Northumberland, England
• Died: August 12, 1848
• Place of death: Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England

Stephenson was one of the great pioneers in railroad development. By constructing and equipping the Stockton and Darlington and the Liverpool and Manchester railways, he demonstrated the economic practicality of the steam railway, guaranteeing its rapid development as Great Britain’s basic transportation system.

Early Life

George Stephenson was born and raised along the banks of the River Tyne. Because the economy of his native Tyneside was based on coal, he grew up surrounded by technological elements used extensively in coal mining that were later to be brought together in the railway industry. Coal from the mines often reached the coal-carrying ships on the Tyne by means of tramways, where wagons rolled on wooden rails. On the level, horses were used to pull the wagons. On the downgrade, gravity sufficed. Large stationary steam engines pumped water from the mines and operated the winding gear that lifted coal and miners from the depths. Steam engines had been introduced into England by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen toward the beginning of the eighteenth century and had been greatly improved by James Watt during the 1760’s.

Stephenson’s father worked as an engineer with steam machinery at a succession of Tyneside pits. The younger Stephenson embarked on a similar career when, barely out of childhood, he joined his father as an assistant fireman. He received no formal schooling and was still illiterate at the age of eighteen. Educational credentials were of no concern, however, to the miners and mine owners of the Tyneside. Their interests were in the extraction and shipment of coal, efficiently and, if possible, safely. Stephenson rapidly proved to have the skills and instincts of a natural mechanic.

Engaged as a maintenance man for the Grand Allies, a consortium of Northumbrian mine owners, Stephenson quickly earned a reputation as one who could fix or improve a machine after briefly watching its operation, absorbing its principles in his own mind even though he was generally unable to explain those principles adequately to others. At the age of thirty, in 1811, his success in refining a hitherto unsuccessful steam pump, so that a constantly flooded coal pit could for the first time be worked, attracted more than local attention. Four years later, in the autumn of 1815, a brief spate of experimentation led to Stephenson’s creation of a safety lamp for use by coal miners, a lamp that would not ignite mine gases and cause disastrous underground explosions.

Stephenson’s lamp emerged almost simultaneously with that of Sir Humphry Davy. Apparently, the unschooled Northumbrian and the respected scientist had independently hit upon the same principle at the same time. Stephenson’s work for the mines led also to his participation in improvements in the transport of coal. In 1814, Stephenson’s first locomotive, the Blucher , went into operation, a cumbersome, slow, and inefficient machine, not a major improvement on other Northumbrian locomotives, which had begun to supplement horses and fixed engines in the Tyneside coal fields. Stephenson’s older brother was driver of the Blucher and—indicative of the still-early stage of locomotive evolution—his sister-in-law was once called upon to push the Blucher when it stalled. In 1816, Stephenson patented a new type of rail assembly for use on coal tramways, because as motive power became heavier, the permanent way required analogous improvement.

Life’s Work

Stephenson might have remained a locally respected but obscure mechanical jack-of-all-trades on the Tyneside had he not attracted the attention of Edward Pease, the Quaker proprietor of coal mines in County Durham, thirty-five miles south of Stephenson’s Tyneside. The County Durham coalfield had suffered historically, as contrasted with that of the Tyneside, because of its inadequate access to deep water. Pease and his circle hoped to overcome that handicap by constructing a canal or tramway connecting the mines west of Darlington with tidal water at Stockton.

On April 19, 1821, Pease and Stephenson met at Darlington, and from that consultation came Stephenson’s appointment as engineer of the Stockton and Darlington Railway . Stephenson surveyed the twenty-five-mile line and supervised its construction. His son Robert, born in 1803, assisted in the survey and in June, 1823, was put in charge of Robert Stephenson and Company, of Newcastle, a firm established by the two Stephensons and the Pease family to build locomotives that would supply some of the power for the Stockton and Darlington.

The new railway, opened on September 27, 1825, was a hybrid operation. Horses pulled some trains, locomotives others. Although there was some passenger traffic, the road was designed primarily for coal, and several inclined planes sped the coal wagons on their way toward the sea by gravity. The Stockton and Darlington was an immediate success, financially as well as mechanically. Investors, engineers, and journalists from throughout Great Britain and the Continent as well made tours of inspection, returning home to spread the news of Stephenson’s triumph.

Even before the opening of the Stockton and Darlington, Stephenson had been engaged by Liverpool investors as engineer of the Liverpool and Manchester. Heavy traffic in that vital corridor, raw cotton from America passing through the port of Liverpool to the textile factories at Manchester, and manufactured cloth making the return journey from Manchester had been monopolized by the Bridgewater Canal, which supplied service that shippers considered both unreliable and expensive.

Plans for a rival means of transport had been around for years, but it took the evident progress on the Stockton and Darlington to convert talk into action. Stephenson, working from earlier surveys and relatively cursory fieldwork of his own, presented plans to a parliamentary committee in March, 1825, only to discover, for the first time in his life, the existence of substantial opposition to his plans. The canal interests joined with local landowners to contest the Liverpool and Manchester’s application for permission to acquire land by eminent domain, and opposing counsel found it easy to make Stephenson sound incompetent and his plans inadequate.

Stephenson’s engineering genius lay in his ability to get things built and operating and in his confidence in that ability. His paper plans were faulty—to the consternation of conventionally trained engineers—because he fully intended to resolve real problems on the ground when construction was under way. That approach had always been his method and, with Stephenson, it worked. Speaking in a heavy Northumbrian dialect almost incomprehensible to the parliamentarians in London, and saddled with admittedly defective specifications, Stephenson was unable to defend his project, and it was rejected by the parliamentary committee.

The Liverpool promoters reacted to Stephenson’s humiliation by engaging three professionally trained engineers, George and John Rennie and Charles Vignoles. It was they who won parliamentary approval for the Liverpool and Manchester in the parliamentary session of 1826. Men of that stripe, with the right accents and paper qualifications, including membership in the Institute of Civil Engineers, presented a striking contrast to Stephenson.

Intellectually insecure, Stephenson throughout his career remained defensively hostile toward his better-connected competitors. Even physically, the contrast between Stephenson and men such as the Rennies was obvious. Tall, muscular, and ruddy-cheeked, Stephenson looked like a man accustomed to hard labor out-of-doors. The proprietors, well aware of the contrasts, had nevertheless not lost their basic faith in Stephenson, who was again put in charge of the project once the parliamentary hurdle had been surmounted. The Liverpool and Manchester was built under Stephenson’s close personal supervision. Not only was Stephenson the engineer of the thirty-mile line, which included the massive cut at Olive Mount at the Liverpool end and the difficult construction across the unstable bog at Chat Moss toward Manchester, but also the Stephensons supplied the company’s motive power.

Before trials held on the line at Rainhill in 1829, there had been some question as to whether the line would be operated by horse or by locomotive. The development, primarily by Robert Stephenson, of a much speedier and more efficient locomotive, the Rocket, which won the Rainhill competition against four other machines, settled the question of railway power definitively in favor of the steam locomotive. When the Liverpool and Manchester was opened on September 15, 1830, the railway had come of age, and Stephenson was the man most prominently associated with it in the public mind.

Even before the completion and striking financial success of the Liverpool and Manchester, serious plans for its extension were in hand. Stephenson was appointed engineer of the southern portion of the Grand Junction, a line designed to connect the Liverpool and Manchester with Birmingham, but once again sloppy paperwork revealed deficiencies in his survey and the Grand Junction passed out of his control.

Stephenson supervised construction of the Manchester and Leeds, which made the first rail crossing of the Pennines by means of a tunnel more than a mile and a half long, and of the lines that were to become the core of the giant Midland Railway: the Birmingham and Derby, the North Midland, and the York and North Midland. Their completion, in 1840, resulted in a complete although circuitous connection between London and York. It fell to his son, Robert, to direct construction of the London and Birmingham, completed in 1838, and the routes north from York. With the opening of Robert Stephenson’s Royal Border Bridge at Berwick in 1850, two years after George Stephenson’s death, a through route was established between London and Edinburgh, only twenty years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester.

Significance

Dr. Dionysius Lardner, a publicist sometimes more addicted to rhetoric than to facts, awarded to George Stephenson in 1836 the title “Father of the Locomotive,” a claim impossible to defend. Locomotives, in common with many other important inventions, were not the product of one mind. If anyone deserved that title, it is probably Richard Trevithick, the Cornish mining engineer. In the Stephenson family, Robert’s contribution to development of the locomotive is greater than that of his father.

Stephenson’s achievements in mechanical engineering, although certainly not minimal, are greatly surpassed by his contributions in civil engineering, the survey and construction of economically profitable railway lines without which there would have been no scope for the locomotive. Stephenson strove always to construct a nearly level line in order to enable the locomotive to use its power for speed rather than for climbing. Consequently, a Stephenson line is marked by cuts, great earthen fills, tunnels, and occasional circuitry—anything to avoid grades. Although some of Stephenson’s successors were less willing to sacrifice directness for levelness, Stephenson’s designs established a norm for subsequent British railway-building practice.

An even greater contribution is tied to Stephenson’s insistence on use everywhere of a “standard” gauge between parallel rails, although the question of gauge also points to limitations characteristics of Stephenson. He adopted his “standard” gauge (four feet, eight and a half inches) without apparent calculation, merely using the gauge customarily found on Northumbrian tramroads. There was no technological justification for selection of the basic measurement that governed all future construction of railway lines and rolling stock. When first identified by Stephenson, his gauge was four feet, eight inches. The extra half inch appears to have crept in through usage, an indication of Stephenson’s rough-and-ready methods.

Stephenson’s insistence on a standard gauge was central to his early recognition of the potential of a unified national railway system. Only with a standard gauge would it be possible for railway equipment to run freely throughout Great Britain. By contrast, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, engineer of the Great Western Railway, a man of greater technological brilliance, used a seven-foot gauge, indicative of Brunel’s lack of concern about the significance of the resultant inability to interchange traffic with other lines. Fixed firmly in Stephenson’s mind was a vision of the kind of integrated national rail network that in fact emerged, and that to Victorian Britain became as vital and basic as the automobile was to become for the late twentieth century world.

Bibliography

Carlson, Robert E. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Project, 1821-1831. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969. A detailed study of the project through which Stephenson gained and held the public eye.

Jeaffreson, J. C., and William Pole. The Life of Robert Stephenson. 2 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864. The standard nineteenth century biography of Robert Stephenson, carefully composed but less readable, and therefore less influential, than Samuel Smiles’s work on George Stephenson.

McGowan, Christopher. Rail, Steam, and Speed: The “Rocket” and the Birth of Steam Locomotion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. An account of the 1829 Rainhill Trials—the competition between five locomotives to power the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Describes the technology employed by Stephenson and his son, Robert, in the design of “Rocket,” the locomotive that won the competition, and the Stephensons’ subsequent influence on British railway development.

Perkin, Harold. The Age of the Railway. London: Panther, 1970. This is a well-documented study, by a social historian, of the impact of the railway on Victorian society. Chapter 3, “The Men Who Made the Railways,” contains material on Stephenson.

Rees, Gareth. Early Railway Prints: British Railways from 1825 to 1850. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. Contains ninety-five contemporary plates, thirty-one in color, offering a vivid visual impression of British railways in the period of Stephenson. Included are sixteen views of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

Robbins, Michael. The Railway Age in Britain and Its Impact on the World. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965. A highly readable short account of the building of the British railways and their place in the Victorian scene. Chapter 3 is entitled “George Stephenson and the Great Builders.”

Rolt, L. T. C. The Railway Revolution: George and Robert Stephenson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962. The major modern biography, working from the premise that the two Stephensons were complementary figures, neither of whom can be adequately understood in isolation from the other. Based on both published and manuscript materials and including maps of Stephenson lines and drawings of Stephenson locomotives.

Simmons, Jack. The Railway in England and Wales, 1830-1914: The System and Its Working. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978. An excellent modern introduction to the English railway, containing numerous references to Stephenson’s contributions.

Smiles, Samuel. Life of George Stephenson. London: John Murray, 1864. The classic biography, of major importance in solidifying Stephenson’s reputation as a Victorian hero. Occasionally attributes to George Stephenson work that was in fact that of his son.

Worth, Martin. Sweat and Inspiration: Pioneers of the Industrial Age. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 1999. This book, which accompanied a British Broadcasting Company radio series about engineers, includes information on Stephenson’s construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.