George Stephenson
- For the British politician, see George Stevenson.
George Stephenson (9 June 1781 – 12 August 1848) was an English mechanical engineer who designed the famous and historically important steam locomotive named Rocket and is known as the "Father of Railways". The Victorians considered him a great example of diligent application and thirst for improvement, with self-help advocate Samuel Smiles particularly praising his achievements. His rail gauge of 4 ft 8½ in (1435 mm), sometimes called "Stephenson gauge", is the world's standard gauge.
Life
Early career
George Stephenson was born in Wylam, Northumberland, 9.3 miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1748, a wagonway—similar to a railway, but with wooden track for horse-drawn carts—had been built, running for several miles from Wylam colliery to the River Tyne. Stephenson grew up near it, and in 1802 gained employment as an engine-man at a coal mine. For the next ten years his knowledge of steam engines increased, until in 1812 he stopped operating them for a living, and started building them.
Stephenson designed his first locomotive in 1814, a travelling engine designed for hauling coal on a coal site. Named Blücher after the Prussian general Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who fought Napoleon at Waterloo, it could haul 30 tons of coal, and was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive: its traction depended only on the contact between its flanged wheels and the rail. Over the next five years, he built 16 more engines.
His ingenuity also found other outlets. In 1815, he developed a miners' safety lamp, known as the Geordie lamp to distinguish it from the Davy lamp invented by Humphry Davy at much the same time. (There was controversy over which was invented first.)
As his success grew, Stephenson was hired to build an 8-mile (13-km) railway from Hetton colliery to Sunderland in 1820. The finished result used a combination of gravity down inclines and locomotives for level and upward stretches, and was the first railway to use no animal power at all.
In 1821, the project to build the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) began. The original plan was to use horses to draw coal carts on metal rails, but after company director Edward Pease met Stephenson he agreed to change the plans. Work began in 1822, and in September 1825 Stephenson completed the first locomotive for the new railway: originally named Active, it was soon renamed Locomotion. The S&DR opened on 27 September 1825. Driven by Stephenson, Locomotion hauled an 80-ton load of coal and flour nine miles (15 km) in two hours, reaching a speed of 24 miles per hour (39 km/h) on one stretch. The first purpose-built passenger car, dubbed Experiment, was attached, and carried dignitaries on the opening journey. It was the first time passenger traffic had been run on a steam locomotive railway.
Rise to fame
While building the S&DR, Stephenson had noticed that even small inclines greatly reduced the speed of locomotives (and even slight declines would have made the primitive brakes next to useless). He came to the conclusion that railways should be kept as level as possible. He used this knowledge while working on the Bolton and Leigh Railway and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR), executing a series of difficult cuts, embankments and stone viaducts to smooth the route the railways took. Defective surveying of the original route of the L&MR caused by the hostility of some of the affected landowners meant that Stephenson was given a very bad time during Parliamentary scrutiny of the original bill, which was rejected. A revised bill with a new alignment was submitted and passed in a subsequent session. The revised alignment presented a considerable problem: the crossing of Chat Moss, an apparently bottomless peat bog, which Stephenson eventually overcame by unusual means, effectively floating the line across it.
As the L&MR approached completion in 1829, its directors arranged for a competition to decide who would build its locomotives, and the Rainhill Trials were run in October of that year. Stephenson's entry was Rocket, and its impressive performance in winning the contest made it arguably the most famous machine in the world.
The opening ceremony of the L&MR, on 15 September 1830, was a considerable event, drawing luminaries from the government and industry, including the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. The day was marred by the death of William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, who was struck and killed by Rocket, but the railway was a resounding success. Stephenson became a very famous man, and was offered the position of chief engineer for a wide variety of other railways.
However, his conservative views on the capabilities of locomotives meant that he tended to favour routes and civil engineering that were more costly than his successors thought necessary. For example, rather than the West Coast Main Line taking the direct route favoured by Joseph Locke over Shap between Lancaster and Carlisle, Stephenson was in favour of a longer sea-level route via Ulverston and Whitehaven. Locke's route was the one built.
Stephenson therefore tended to become a reassuring name, rather than a cutting-edge technical adviser. He was the first president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on its formation in 1847. He had by this time settled into semi-retirement, supervising his mining interests in Derbyshire - tunnelling work for the North Midland Railway had revealed unworked coal seams, and Stephenson put much of his money into their exploitation. Rich and successful, George Stephenson died on 12 August 1848 at Tapton House in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.
Legacy
His son, Robert Stephenson, was also a noted locomotive engineer, and was heavily involved in the creation of many of his father's engines from Locomotion onwards. Joseph Locke was initially apprenticed to George Stephenson, eventually being promoted to chief engineer on some of the schemes he instigated, such as the Grand Junction Railway.
The museum in Chesterfield, England has a room full of Stephenson memorabilia, including the straight thick glass tubes in which he (inventive to the last) grew his cucumbers to stop them curving. George Stephenson College, founded in 2001 on the University of Durham's Queen's Campus in Stockton-on-Tees, is named after him. Also named after him and his son is George Stephenson High School in Killingworth, the Stephenson Railway Museum in North Shields and the Stephenson Locomotive Society.
As a tribute to his life and works, a bronze statue of Stephenson was unveiled at Chesterfield railway station (which is overlooked by Tapton House, where Stephenson spent the last ten years of his life) on 28 October 2005, marking the completion of improvements to the station. At the event a full-size working replica of Rocket was on show, which then spent two days on public display at the Chesterfield Market Festival.
Stephenson's portrait appeared on Bank of England £5 notes between 1990 and 2003.
See also
Biographical works
- Smiles, Samuel The Life of George Stephenson, London, 1857
- Hunter Davies George Stephenson (The Remarkable Life of the Founder of Railways), Stroud: Sutton Publishing 2004. ISBN 0-7509-3795-5. (Revised version originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975.)
External links