George Stephenson

George Stephenson could not read until he was eighteen and set the gauge that most of the world's railways still use. He was born at Wylam near Newcastle, the son of a colliery fireman, and worked with engines from childhood, paying for night school out of wages. His first success was a miner's safety lamp, developed in 1815 at the same time as Humphry Davy's and independently; the Royal Society backed Davy and accused Stephenson of copying, which he denied and which local subscription answered by giving him a purse of a thousand pounds. He built locomotives for the Killingworth colliery, then engineered the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened in 1825 and the first public line to use steam. The Liverpool and Manchester followed in 1830, and the Rainhill trials of 1829, which his son Robert's Rocket won, settled that locomotives rather than stationary engines would haul the trains. The gauge he used at Killingworth, four feet eight and a half inches, became standard because his lines came first and connected. He was suspicious of theory and of educated engineers, and his surveys were sometimes wrong; the achievement was in making the thing work and repeat. He gave evidence to Parliament in an accent members claimed they could not understand. He opened a locomotive works in Forth Street, Newcastle, in 1823, the first factory in the world built to make locomotives. Carrying the Liverpool and Manchester across Chat Moss, a bog that swallowed everything tipped into it, he floated the line on hurdles of brushwood and heather, and it still carries traffic. The opening day in 1830 killed the member of parliament William Huskisson, who stepped into the path of the Rocket. He refused a knighthood and fellowship of the Royal Society. His son Robert, whom he had paid to educate properly, became the greater engineer of the two and they worked together for thirty years.

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