January 28, 2026 • 44 mins
George Stephenson started life in extremely humble circumstances, but his ingenuity and pursuit of education led him to an impressive legacy. He invented a miner’s lamp, but is most well known for his work on locomotives and railways.
Research:
- “George Stephenson (1781-1848).” https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/stephenson_george.shtml#:~:text=In%201814%2C%20Stephenson%20constructed%20his%20first%20locomotive%2C,construction%20of%20the%20Stockton%20and%20Darlington%20railway.\
- Bellis, Mary. “George Stephenson and the Invention of the Steam Locomotive Engine.” ThoughtCo. May 13, 2025. https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-railroad-1992457
- Bellis, Mary. “Biography of James Watt, Inventor of the Modern Steam Engine.” ThoughtCo. April 27, 2020. https://www.thoughtco.com/james-watt-inventor-of-the-modern-steam-engine-1992685
- Bellis, Mary. “Biography of Thomas Newcomen, Inventor of the Steam Engine.” July 15, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/thomas-newcomen-profile-1992201
- Bibby, Miriam. “Rainhill Trials.” Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Rainhill-Trials/
- Burton, Ken. “Local History: John Blenkinsop 1783-1831.” South Leeds Life. April 29, 2023. https://southleedslife.com/local-history-john-blenkinsop-1783-1831/
- Cavendish, Richard. “George Stephenson's First Steam Locomotive.” History Today. July 7, 2014. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/george-stephensons-first-steam-locomotive
- Institution of Civil Engineers. “George Stephenson.” https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/meet-the-engineers/george-stephenson
- Network Rail. “George Stephenson (1781–1848).” https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-are/our-history/eminent-engineers/george-stephenson-1781-1848/
- Rolt, L.T.C. “George and Robert Stephenson.” Amberley Publishing. 2016.
- “Safety Lamps.” Smithsonian. https://www.si.edu/spotlight/mining-lights-and-hats/safety-lamps
- Smiles, Samuel. “Lives of Engineers. The Locomotive. GEORGE AND ROBERT STEPHENSON.” LONDON. JOHN MURRAY. 1879. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27710/27710-h/27710-h.htm#footnote129
- Stephenson Steam Railway Museum. https://www.northeastmuseums.org.uk/stephensonsteamrailway
- Stephenson, George. “A description of the safety lamp, invented by George Stephenson. To which is added, an account of the lamp constructed by sir H. Davy. [With] A collection of all the letters which have appeared in the Newcastle papers, with other documents, relating to the safety lamps.” London. Baldwin, Craddock and Joy. January 1817. Accessed online: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=SYkIAAAAQAAJ&rdid=book-SYkIAAAAQAAJ&rdot=1
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
So today's topic has come up on the show before.
He came up recently, very briefly, in our self Help
Books episode. He also came up in our two parter
on Sir Humphrey Davy. He was one of the people
who also invented a minor safety lamp, got involved in
a rather he did argument over who did it first.
But he is most well known for his work on
(00:38):
locomotives and railways. He's often called the father of railways,
and that is George Stephenson, and we are going to
talk about him today. George Stevenson was born on June ninth,
seventeen eighty one in Wylam, England, which is in the
county of Northumberland. His parents, Robert and Mabel car Stephenson,
were quite poor. Robert worked as a fireman at the
(01:01):
Walam Colliery. This was one of several jobs working in
coal that he had in his life, and that is
because coal pits would be opened up very quickly mind
to exhaustion and then closed, so people had to follow
the trail of new mine openings to make a living.
That meant consequently, working in coal was a nomadic life.
(01:23):
George was the second of six children, and when he
was born, the Stevensons were living with three other families
in a small cottage that was less than two yards
from a wooden railway that was used for horse drawn
carts carrying coal from the mines, and George followed in
his father's footsteps. He did not go to school and
(01:43):
he started working when he was a child of eight.
This was really quite normal for children in coal mining villages.
Neither of George's parents could read or write, and they
also had started working when they were just kids. George's
first job was watching a neighbors cows and horse and
helping in the garden, but he started colliery work not
much later. He started out as a picker, meaning he
(02:07):
picked things like a metal and slate out of the coal.
He then moved on to a job driving one of
the horses that pulled mine carts, but eventually he moved
up again and made his way to become his father's assistant.
George grew up around early steam powered technology, but from
the blue collar side of it. His father operated a
(02:28):
new Coman atmospheric steam engine at the local colliery. This
was an engine developed by preacher and inventor Thomas Nukeman
in seventeen twelve. It was designed to pump water out
of mines. The water that was pumped out by the
engine would then be routed to water wheels to provide
power for other equipment. Stevenson became a Newkeman operator when
(02:52):
he was still a teenager. George's siblings also went to
work when they were still children, and all of the
boys worked at the colliery. Yeah, his sisters did domestic work,
but George was also really interested in the world, and
he was curious by nature. He was absolutely fascinated by
anything mechanical, and he loved to take things apart and
(03:13):
then put them back together. So working in the mines
meant that he had a lot of equipment around that
he could examine and sometimes work on. He would also
create models of engines out of clay. But he also
loved animals. When he was a boy tending cows, he
liked to search for birds nests as he went about
his days, and he really loved blackbirds. In particular, he
(03:36):
had as a boy a blackbird that became so accustomed
to him that it became a pet, and it slept
at the head of his bed each night. He also
kept rabbits that he caught. There are many stories of
him throughout his life making friends with wild animals and
turning them into pets. As he was becoming an adult,
he decided to go after the education he hadn't been
(03:57):
able to get when he was younger. He had gotten
into his adolescence still not knowing how to read or write,
but he knew if he wanted to know more about
the world, he needed to learn. He started taking classes
at night after his full day shifts at the mines.
One of his motivations, according to the biography written by
Samuel Smiles in eighteen fifty seven, was that because George
(04:20):
and the other men at the colliery knew about Napoleon's
movements in Europe, they wanted more details, but nobody could
read the newspaper. He also wanted to learn more about
keeping animals. For all of these things, he was going
to need to learn how to read. And then, in
addition to matters of personal interest, he knew that if
(04:40):
he wanted to advance in his career that reading was
a necessity. To be clear with this, he started at
the very beginning, and his earliest lessons he had to
learn the alphabet because he had never been taught even that.
He was nineteen when he learned to write his name
for the first time. Once he mastered reading, George also
(05:01):
started taking lessons in arithmetic. This early education set him
on a path of lifelong learning. He continued to study
various subjects all through his life, often on his own
in the evenings after work. Yeah, it sounds based on
descriptions like he wasn't just casually like, oh, I think
I'm going to read this book next, Like he was
kind of putting together little curricula for himself and being
(05:25):
like this month, I'm going to study this, So this
month I'm going to learn about this, which is quite admirable.
George met a woman named Francis Anderson during this time
in his life. She was working as a domestic servant
in the farmer's home, where George had moved when his
job took him away from his family home. He and Francis,
who went by Fanny, got married in November eighteen oh two,
(05:49):
Francis was older than him. I read differing numbers, some
that said she was nine years older, some that said
she was twelve, but roughly a decade. He had actually
wooed her sister Anne unsuccessfully before he and Frances struck
up a courtship, and this was, by all accounts though,
a very good match, and the pair had a very
(06:09):
loving marriage. They seemed to be what everybody hopes for
best friends, and they always chose each other's company in
the evenings and in their spare time over other options
of places they could be. Knowing that he needed to
support a family, Stevenson sought to expand his income by
diversifying his revenue streams, meaning he learned a lot of skills.
(06:32):
He had already learned shoe repair before he met Fanny.
He had actually resold a pair of her shoes while
they were courting, and soon he also added clock repair
to his repertoire. He also, at least according to some accounts,
started cutting out clothing for the wives of his coworkers
so they could get right to sewing it up, so
he had his hands in a lot of activities. Just
(06:54):
before the wedding, George started working as a brakesman at
Willington Colliery that came with the significant pay bump. A
brakesman operates the winch at the top of the pit
that brings the coal up out of a mine. This
position was considered to be skilled labor, and so that's
why it came with a pay increase. He also continued
(07:14):
to take side jobs. At one point, he was so
busy hauling cargo out of the holds of ships that
he cut back his engine operator hours and his friend
William Fairbain took this dropped hours from him. This extra
income had good timing since George and Francis had a
son eleven months after they got married. That was on
(07:35):
October sixteenth, eighteen oh three. They named their son Robert.
George really adored Robert, and Robert would become an important
collaborator with George as an adult. Less than a year
after Robert's birth, the Stevenson's moved again, this time to
Killingworth for another brakesman position. Uh. Coming up, We're going
(07:56):
to get to a point in George's biography where his
life takes some sad turns. So we're gonna pause before
we get into that, and hear from our sponsors. In
the summer of eighteen oh five, Francis and George had
(08:18):
another baby, a daughter, but the infant died when she
was still a baby, although accounts of her age at
death very quite a bit. Some say that she died
after just a few weeks, others a few months. But
Francis also became ill and she died of tuberculosis in
eighteen oh six. So now George had to raise their
son alone, and initially he hired a housekeeper to look
(08:42):
after young Robert, and that was because he had been
offered a lucrative temporary job in Montrose, Scotland. He may
have also just needed some time away from his regular
life to deal with his grief, which was considerable. George
made this journey to Scotland on foot, and I looked
it up on Google Maps and according to that that
would have been about sixty eight hours worth of walking
(09:03):
one way. When he returned, he learned that his housekeeper
had married his younger brother. That honestly was great, but
it meant that he did need a new housekeeper to
help take care of his son. That job was eventually
filled by his sister Eleanor. The Stevenson family had a
couple of financial and health hardships. Around this time, George's father, Robert,
(09:26):
had been badly injured in a work accident and suffered
steam burns and the loss of his vision. George saw
to it that his father's debts were paid and that
he was set up with everything he needed, and also
arranged to take care of all of the older Robert's
expenses for the rest of his life. This, of course,
significantly depleted the money he had saved up. Yeah, he
(09:49):
had returned from Scotland with a good bit of money,
and more than two thirds of it was immediately used
for this effort. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic Wars had led to
written expanding their militia, and George was selected for conscription.
He did have the option to pay for his substitute
to serve in his stead, and he took that option
(10:10):
because he wanted to stay near his family, particularly his son,
and this was something a lot of wealthy families did
as a matter of course, but George wasn't wealthy. He
went broke doing this, and while he did feel like
it was the right decision to stay with Robert both
Robert truly, he was also incredibly depressed to find himself
with nothing. After years of working really hard and moving
(10:32):
up the ladder in the collieries and being really frugal
and careful with his money, he went right back to
a brakesman job to keep himself, his son, and his
father afloat.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He took a.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Temporary job in eighteen oh eight at the Westmore Pit
along with two other brakesmen. The terms of their contract
gave the three brakesmen their pay based on how many
loads they could pull in, so Stevenson wanted to find
ways they could increase their productivity and I'll make more
money from the job. So the first thing he did
was watch the equipment and noted anything that stood out,
(11:06):
And right away he noticed that the ropes on the
winding machine wore out much more quickly at the Westmore
Pit than on average, so he deduced that they were
probably encountering more friction than was normal. He got permission
to make some changes to the pulley system on the winch,
and this led to an immediate improvement in the system.
(11:29):
He got in the habit of taking the machinery he
was in charge of apart on Saturdays at the end
of every work week then he would clean it and
reassemble it, and as a consequence, that machine stayed in
tip top shape all of the time, and Stevenson became
an expert at every inner working. In nineteen ten, a
new pit was opened at Killingworth. This was known as
(11:51):
the High Pit and it had a new come in
engine to pump the water out of the mine shaft.
But that engine was problematic. It never succeeded in clearing
the water from the pit, no matter how hard its
operators tried, so if the water couldn't come out of
the pit, they couldn't go down and mine it. George,
who was back at Killingworth as a brakesman at this point,
(12:12):
would often stop by the pit and watch this new
coman try and fail to pump. And he had actually
told some of the mind managers when he saw this
engine installed that he thought it was defective, but he
was also just a brakesman, so his council was not
really considered in the decisions of the mechanics. He also
told one of the shaft sinkers those are the people
(12:33):
that drill down and create the shafts, that he thought
he could probably fix that machine. After weeks of no progress,
with that engine. The sinker mentioned to his pause that
George Stevenson thought that he had a solution, and after
that information ran up the chain of command, it was
decided that letting a brakesman try his hand at a
repair couldn't make things anything worse. According to the Smiles biography,
(12:57):
mining manager Ralph Dodds told George, quote, We'll give you
a fair trial and you must set to work immediately.
We are clean, drowned out and cannot get a step further.
The engineers hereabouts are all bet and if you really
succeed in accomplishing what they cannot do, you may depend
on it.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
I will make you a man for life.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
So George, as we've established, was very familiar with nukeman engines.
He had worked with them from the time he was
a teenager. He had hands on experience tinkering with them
in those early jobs. He insisted that he had to
pick the team of mechanics that he was going to
work with. That caused some bruised egos. He also said
(13:38):
his team needed to be of all one political affiliation.
They either all needed to be Whigs or they all
needed to be Tories to avoid unnecessary friction and bickering
among them. Holly did not find out which party they
kind of landed on. I'm kind of curious, was were
George's affiliations just flexible? I feel like George was not
(14:02):
terribly interested in politics. Okay, he was interested in engines.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Once he had assembled his team, they took the entire
engine apart, piece by piece, and this was a huge machine,
so it was a significant undertaking. Three days later the
whole thing was back together, and at first it did
not seem like it was going to work any better
than when it first started. But within two days the
water in the mine had been completely pumped out. Ralph
(14:32):
Dodds made good on his promise. He gave Stevenson a
gift of ten pounds and then promoted him to the
role of engine men at.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
The High Pit.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
That came with a much higher salary than he had
ever gotten before. His responsibilities and income grew even more
the following year when the High Pit's engine right was
killed in an accident and George inherited that job. Yeah,
he kind of moved into the position of management over
the other mechanics. Throughout all of his career, accomplishments and promotions.
(15:03):
George had sought out teachers to improve his knowledge, and
he really wanted to improve his math skills. He would
get arithmetic assignments from this friend of his, John Wigham,
who was very skilled at math, and he would work
out problems during downtime at work or in the evenings,
and then he would present them to John for correction.
Wigham also taught George how to draw up plans and
(15:26):
basic mechanical diagrams, and then the two men actually worked
together from a book to learn the laws of mechanics,
which is the most charming, sweet thing I've ever heard.
Over the years, George was also seeing to his son,
Robert's education, and when he had still been earning a
pretty meager wage, he had made the decision that Robert
would get an education. George later wrote, quote, in the
(15:49):
earlier period of my career, when Robert was a little boy,
I saw how deficient I was in education, and I
made up my mind that he should not labor under
the same defect, but that I would put him in
a good school and give him a liberal training. I was, however,
a poor man, and how do you think I managed.
I betook myself to mending my neighbor's clocks and watches
(16:11):
at night after my daily labor was done, and thus
I procured the means of educating my son. In eighteen fifteen,
when Robert was twelve, he started attending a day school
in Newcastle. Yeah, in addition to all those side jobs,
this increase in pay really really helped make this plan
come to fruition. This step in Robert's education also, though,
(16:34):
offers another glimpse into the ways that George continually sought
to expand his own knowledge. So Robert would go to
school during the day, and then in the evenings George
would sit with Robert and review his homework. But this
wasn't a case of his father helping exactly, George was
taking the opportunity to follow along with Robert's studies so
(16:55):
that he could learn the same mathematical concepts that his
son was being taught. Or Che also gave his son
assignments like building a sun dial for their cottage, so
that he would learn to apply his knowledge to practical uses,
and Robert, with the help of his father, did gain
enough of an understanding of astronomy and math to make
that sun dial. They hung it outside their cottage and
(17:17):
George pointed it out to everyone who visited. He was
very proud of it, and it moved to Robert's home
later in life. One of George Stevenson's first big achievements
as an inventor happened after he had visited another colliery
to see their mobile steam boiler. This is a proto
locomotive invented by John Blankensop. Blankensop's wheeled steam boiler was
(17:41):
intended to bring coal out of the mines, but that
was a big ask. That Memphis machine had to be
able to run on the rails that had been tracked
into the mine. But there were concerns about it that
while it was powerful, it would never really have enough
grip to pull itself and a load of hole Blankensop
(18:02):
came up with a solution, which was a ratchet wheel
that had teeth that would set into a special track
called a rack rail that had holes in it at
intervals matching up with the wheel teeth. Blankensop's engine was
really a marvel. It was natural for every engineer and
mechanic in England to want to see it, and it
was ingenious, but it also had problems. The rack rail
(18:25):
tended to take a lot of strain, It needed a
lot of repairs, and the one that Stevenson had gone
to look at had a boiler explosion not long after that.
While the coal industry was very interested in the idea
of a locomotive, they were also a bit wary of
the whole field up to that point. Yeah, anytime there's
(18:45):
a big, you know, disruptive change in technology, it's scary,
especially if it explodes. Horses worked just fine, and this
one came with obvious danger. This was not Stevenson's first
experience with the idea of a mobile steam engine. He
had been thinking about these kinds of machines for a
while because the coal industry was really the driving force
(19:09):
behind their development, and a lot of people had been
talking about them. Stevenson thought there had to be a
way to make a mobile steam boiler that didn't have
the issues of reliability that Blankensops did, and he started
thinking about how the problem with the cogs might be solved.
He made a serious and methodical study of Blankensop's engine
and all of the other engine attempts that had been
(19:31):
developed in the early nineteenth century, and he made a
list of all of their shortcomings and then he set
out to create something that would transcend all of those problems.
And when he went to the owners of the Killingworth
Minds to tell them that he wanted to invent a locomotive,
that word didn't exist, yet they gave him the money
to do it. To be clear, that word, of course,
(19:53):
wasn't in use for railroad vehicles. It existed as a word,
but it was going to soon change. Stevenson in his
sh we called his project a traveling engine. Over the
course of several months, Stevenson and his crew worked to
bring together the machine, and the result was the Blucher,
which debuted on July twenty fifth, eighteen fourteen. It is
(20:14):
said to have been named after Gebhard Lebrech van Blucher,
who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in eighteen thirteen.
Blucher outperformed the steam engines that inspired it, and it
was able to haul thirty tons of coal distributed among
eight wagons, at a rate of four miles an hour.
It was put into work right away at the Killingworth Colliery,
(20:36):
but Stevenson was not entirely happy with the Bluecher. Some
parts of the mechanic of it were kind of cramped.
It would make them difficult to work on if there
was need for repair, and it wasn't always the smoothest
in terms of movement.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
It would sometimes make.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
These jerky lurches forward as the various cylinders driving it
fired one after another. Additionally, the important question of whether
this machine was more efficient and cost effective than carts
pulled by horses was very much in doubt. Stevenson really
looked at the Bluecher as a first draft, and he
really thought he could do better, so he kept working.
(21:13):
The major revision he made to the design was the
steam blast. This is the process of redirecting exhaust steam
up the engine's chimney.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
The fuel for the engine was coal.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Burning coal heated the water in the boiler and that
created the steam that drove the pistons inside the cylinders,
which turned the wheels. Prior to redirecting it, the steam
had run through the engine cylinders and the words of
biographers Smiles quote was at first allowed to escape into
the open atmosphere with a hissing blast, to the terror
(21:46):
of horses and cattle. And watching the Blucher and analyzing
its performance, Stevenson noticed how much more power this steam
blast had than the smoke that left the chimney that
bented off of the fire that heated the boiler. But
Stevenson suspected correctly that if he could run that steam
into the chimney through a pipe, then the air that
(22:08):
was pulled in after it would increase the draft. That
would significantly increase the intensity of the combustion in the furnace,
kind of like a bellows would at a forge. It
would create more energy. After initially testing this idea on
the Blucher, Stevenson started working on a second engine with
the steam blast incorporated into the design from the start,
(22:31):
and he patented this new design on February twenty eighth,
eighteen fifteen. The next several years were prolific for Stevenson
as an inventor. He built an estimated sixteen locomotives at Killingworth.
One of these locomotives, the Killingworth Billy, which Stevenson built
in eighteen sixteen, is in the collection of the Stevenson
(22:52):
Steam Railway Museum. It is the oldest surviving locomotive built
by Stevenson, and this is in part because he would
offer take apart earlier models to make new ones, so
there are not a lot of survivors among those reported.
Sixteen witnessing a number of horrific mining accidents in which
workers were injured and killed. Being very aware of the
(23:15):
danger of fire damp that's methane gas that becomes highly
flammable when mixed with air. That all led Stevenson to
think about ways to improve the safety in the tunnels.
In one instance, he went right into a colliery Maine
that was on fire and asked for six brave men
to follow him so they could douse the flames. He
quickly worked with the volunteers to build a wall to
(23:38):
seal off the main, choking the fire out by depriving
it of air. There were still several fatalities that day,
but if George had not plunged into the pit with
the idea to wall off this fire, a lot more
people would have died. In eighteen fifteen, George gave a
demonstration of the first iteration of a safety lamp that
he had devised to allow illumination of mining pits while
(24:01):
preventing fires. His lamp, which involved a glass cylinder that
was then encased in a tin sleeve, allowed air to
enter only through small holes. It had a slide on
the bottom that could be moved to, in his words,
regulate the quantity of air to be admitted. By the
time the design was refined. It also had several of
what he called capillary tubes that released air through a
(24:24):
series of apertures. A flame could not successfully make it
through these tubes. Stevenson's lamp design, nicknamed the Jordie, was
soon in regular use at Killingworth and other mines in
northern England. Of course, soon after that, Sir Humphrey Davy
revealed his own safety lamp, and soon a battle was
being waged over who had invented it first.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
The supporters of each.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Man became locked in a passionate debate about who should
get this accolade. Stevenson's working class upbringing worked against him
in scientific circles. A lot of the era of gentlemen scientist,
a lot of them had lots of extra money lying around.
It seemed impossible that a colliery worker, and yes, even
one who had engineered these huge step forward and locomotive engines,
(25:11):
could be an inventor on the same level of the
renowned chemist an inventor Sir Humphrey Davy. Davey was given
a two thousand pound award by the coal owners of England.
They gave Stevenson a mere one hundred guineas as kind
of a consolation prize. Stevenson was insulted, and his friends
and supporters were furious and urged him to set that
(25:34):
record straight. Yeah, he apparently spoke very much with an accent.
He did not sound like a refined gentleman from London,
and that really hurt him when he spoke about this invention,
even though he actually was first. That urging of his
friends resulted in a letter which was published in the papers,
and then it was also published later as part of
(25:56):
a collection of many correspondences and documents on the MA.
In George's open letter, which was dictated to his son,
he opened with quote, several of my friends having expressed
a wish that I would lay an engraved plan of
my safety lamp before the public, with as correct an
account of the dates of that invention as I am able,
I have resolved to do so, and he included in
(26:19):
this his designs was kind of a little pamphlet. He
notated the date of October twenty first, eighteen fifteen as
the first time he tested his lamp in the mine,
which was successful, with other tests following in the weeks
directly after showing that he was working on his lamp
well before anyone knew of Davy's efforts, so he could
not have copied him. Supporters in Northern England, through a
(26:42):
committee led by the Earl of Strathmore, CJ. Brambling, collected
money and awarded Stevenson one thousand pounds and a silver watch.
He was given these at a formal dinner. If George
was chagrined that he didn't get enough recognition for his lamp,
he didn't really need to worry. He was about to
embark on a series of projects that would really change
(27:03):
the world, and we'll get to that after a sponsor break.
As the hubbub over the lamp debate died down, Stevenson
turned his focus to the roads and railways used for
coal transport. This was a time when none of these
(27:26):
things were standardized, and rail tracks were run right on
the roads. As a matter of course, you can still
sometimes find roads that also have rail tracks embedded in them,
but this was the only way you could find a
rail At this point, Mines tended to put together their
own rails to carry coal out, and these were often
bumpy and they caused needless wear and tear on the
engines and cars because the rails would shift and cause bouncing.
(27:49):
None of them were really purpose designed. Those rails were
also often made of cast iron. That meant that they
were brittle, so that.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Too needed to be considered.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Stevenson worked to redesign the way that tracks were laid
so that they were smoother and less likely to break,
and he redesigned the wheels of locomotives so that they
worked better on these newly designed tracks. He also redesigned
the pistons and cylinders in the engine so that they
doubled as springs, which reduced the jerking and bouncing of
the engine when it did encounter bumps. In eighteen twenty,
(28:22):
Stevenson got married for a second time to a woman
named Elizabeth Heindmarsh. Betty, as she was called, was a
farmer's daughter. Betty's brother had introduced the two of them
a little more than a year before. There's not a
lot of information about Betty, but the two of them
seemed to have been very happy together. That same year
that he got married eighteen twenty, he was hired to
(28:43):
build a brand new railway which needed to be eight
miles long. This was for the Hetton Colliery and the
project took two years. The new line opened on November eighteenth,
eighteen twenty two, and it was the first railway intended
exclusively for use by engine and not animal drawn carts,
although some carts probably ran on it. George had sort
(29:06):
of invented an entirely new career in this move. He
was a builder of railroads. The next big railway project
to come George Stevenson's way was the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
Stevenson did the survey work to lay out the path
of the railway himself, with several assistants. This project was
to be twenty five miles long, so the survey work
(29:28):
took some time. Construction started in eighteen twenty three, and
Stevenson's newly formed company, Stevenson and Company, was contracted to
build three steam engines for it. By this point, his
son Robert was working with him. One evening, over a
bottle of wine, Stevenson reportedly told his son and another
(29:48):
man named John Dixon, quote, I venture to tell you
that I think you will live to see the day
when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance
in this country, when mail coaches will go by railway,
and railroads will become the great highway for the King
and all his subjects. The time is coming when it
will be cheaper for a working man to travel upon
(30:09):
a railway than to walk on foot. I know there
are great and almost insurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but
what I have said will come to pass as sure
as you live. I only wish I may live to
see the day, though that I can scarcely hope, for
as I know how slow all human progress is, and
(30:30):
with what difficulty I have been able to get the
locomotive thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than ten years
successful experiment at Killingworth. Yeah, he knew, he knew these
were going to become important. The Stockton and Darlington line
opened on September twenty seventh, eighteen twenty five, with an
engine named Locomotion pulling a passenger car called Experiment. Stevenson
(30:53):
drove the locomotion himself, and the people riding aboard Experiment
were the first passengers to be conveyed by a steam
locomotive at times it moved as quickly as twelve miles
per hour. It seemed a dizzying speed at the time,
although often it moved at a much slower pace of
four to six miles per hour. This railway was a
huge success, although the experiment passenger coach ended up being
(31:16):
run by a contractor company and it was often drawn
by a horse rather than a steam engine. And while
initially this line was open for use by anyone who
had a horse drawn wagon, it was sort of like
a public street. That policy was eventually rolled back because
it caused problems as more and more loads were running
on the line via steam engine way too dangerous for
(31:39):
horses to be involved. In eighteen twenty six, the Liverpool
and Manchester Railway Act was passed in Parliament. After several
years of preparations and surveying, This funded construction of the
first ever intercity railway. George Stevenson had been on the
project since the summer of eighteen twenty four. As principal engineer.
He picked up the work of survey or named William James,
(32:01):
who had conducted earlier analysis of the land and determined
a path for the railway, but by the time Stevenson
was brought on William James was in debtors prison. Stevenson
attempted to perform a new survey with some changes to
the route, but he ran into trouble with landowners who
did not want him or a railway on their property.
(32:23):
These were not people angrily shaking fists. They were making
serious threats and brandishing guns. So he ended up turning
in a revised version of James's work, and that was
a mistake. James had been sloppy. He was a little
bit it sounds like a flim flam man. There were
errors in his survey and it was just not an
(32:45):
accurate representation of the land that the line was supposed
to pass through, and that meant that the cost estimate
that Stevenson had prepared based on the survey was also
deeply flawed. He had underestimated its total cost by about
one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. He was questioned about
it all before the House of Commons and it became
apparent he didn't really know what was going on with
(33:08):
that planned route. He was fired and replaced by brothers
George and John Rennie, and after they ran into problems
with the board of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company.
They were booted and Stevenson was back on the project,
although there were ongoing internal struggles. The surveyor that had
been brought on when the Rennies were hired, Charles Blackervignol,
(33:31):
quit because he and Stevenson did just not get along.
This was all such a huge and high stakes undertaking,
it is kind of understandable that tensions would run high
and people might clash, but it eventually shook out. This
was a large enough project that Stevenson divided it into
thirds and assigned a construction superintendent to each ten mile section.
(33:54):
Those were Joseph Locke, William Alcard and John Dixon. Stevenson
moved to Liverpool for the construction of the line and
the work began. One of the most challenging segments, and
an area that had been much discussed during the hearings
on the survey, was a bog known as chat Moss.
The initial plan was that the bog would be drained,
(34:17):
but that turned out to be impossible. Stephenson came up
with the idea to float the railway on the bog.
After embankments had been shored up with dry Moss. It
took a lot longer than expected, and Stephenson was urged
to abandon this whole plan numerous times, but he carried on,
employing hundreds of men to haul materials to dump into
(34:38):
the bog and till this has finally worked. The floating
railway worked and was often noted as being the.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Smoothest part of the line.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
This was not the only instance where the railway had
to cross less than ideal land to complete its course,
and there were sixty four bridges and viaducts built for
the project. Yeah, that Chatmoss Bridge is still there. Stevenson
had made the shift away from cast iron for the
rails and rod iron was used for the line. This
(35:09):
was much more reliable. It was smoother than cast iron,
and that was because it could be laid in much
longer lengths. He also established the gauge the distance between
rails at four feet eight and a half inches that's
one four hundred and thirty five millimeters. There are a
number of different stories as to why that was the measurement.
(35:30):
Some of them are quite fanciful and delightful. As we mentioned,
earlier railways and roads had not been standardized. Mining rails
could be anywhere from four to five feet wide. The
most popular version of the story is that it was
pretty standard for wagon wheels to be set at that width,
like they would fall inside the rails, so if you
were sharing the road with a train, both vehicles could
(35:53):
work on it. That was what Stevenson had used at
Killingsworth Colliery, and he continued to use it after that,
and this number eventually became known as the Stephenson gauge,
and it was adopted as a standard gauge in the
UK Gage Act of eighteen forty six. It's also standard
for the most part around the world. I think I
read a statistic that fifty five percent of railways still
(36:15):
use it. As the railway was under construction, another matter
of debate arose, which was who would build the locomotives
for it. Would it actually use steam locomotives. There had
been a push for the use of fixed engines along
the length of the line that would power winched cables
that would attach to the various vehicles and propel them forward.
(36:39):
Stevenson lobbied against this idea with just a lot of fervor,
and of course Stevenson wanted to be the one to
build the locomotives for the line. There were other contenders, though,
and a contest was announced with a five hundred pound
prize to see who could build the best locomotive. This
was also a test to see if locomotive power really
(36:59):
was that's the best way. As early work on the
Liverpool in Manchester rail was underway, George's favorite collaborator, his
son Robert, was out of the country. Robert had been
in South America since the summer of eighteen twenty four,
and that travel happened for two reasons. One, the silver
and gold mines in South America were in desperate need
(37:20):
of engineers, and two Robert had been ill for some time,
possibly with tuberculosis. It gets mentioned, but it's unclear, and
his doctor had suggested that he spend time in a
warmer climate. So off he went. And when Robert returned
to England in late eighteen twenty seven, he was immediately
put to work on the design and construction of a
(37:41):
new locomotive for this contest. Robert designed an engine known
as Rocket in close collaboration with his father. At this point,
Robert was working in their locomotive shop and George was
in Liverpool and continuing to work.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
On the railway.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
The Rocket and the other competitors got to Liverpool for
the the Rainhill Trials in October of eighteen twenty nine.
There were five competitors total, including the Rocket, the sam
Peril built by Timothy Hackworth, the Novelty built by the
engineering firm of Brathwaite and Ericson, the Perseverance from Timothy
(38:17):
Burstall of Edinburgh, and the Cycloped built by Thomas Brandreth.
The Cycloped was immediately eliminated because it used horse power,
which was against the rules of the competition, but it
really was no competition. None of the other engines could
even finish and they had to withdraw. The Rocket not
only competed the trial, it hit twenty nine miles an
(38:40):
hour at one point, and it handily whipped through the
trials like pushing and pulling carts filled with stones. When
the Liverpool and Manchester line opened on September fifteenth, eighteen thirty,
Stevenson Locomotives were the engines that ran it. Yeah, that
one's kind of funny because a lot of people rode
in saying they were going to participate, but only this
handful actually finished anything that they could bring and there
(39:03):
was another entry. I'm using air quotes because it was
pulled by two guys. It wasn't even a forest power
and they were like no, no, no, no, no, don't
even get on the track. From that moment, George Stevenson
was so in demand that he had to constantly turn
down jobs. He worked on multiple railway lines that slowly
connected all of England's major municipalities. He also consulted and
(39:27):
worked on many projects both in Europe and North America.
When the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was founded in eighteen
forty seven in London, he was the group's first president.
By that point, his second wife, Betty, had died, and
he was as retired as someone who seems dedicated to
their work ever is. After he was widowed a second time,
(39:48):
he became even more interested in things he had long loved,
like gardening and cultivating unusual flora. He invented a method
to grow a perfectly straightened cucumber. He basically grew the
fruit in a glass tube, so his retirement sounds kind
of idyllic. On July twenty sixth, eighteen forty eight, he
read a paper at a meeting of the Institute of
(40:10):
Mechanical Engineers titled on the Fallacies of the Rotary Engine.
That was the last time he attended a meeting. Stevenson
died on August twelfth, eighteen forty eight, after about a
fever in Chesterfield, where he lived at the end of
his life. All the businesses closed on the day of
the funeral, and there was a parade of railroad workers
(40:31):
that followed his casket to Trinity Church where he was buried.
Of course, his son went on to also do a
lot of great things. Perhaps we will do an episode
on Robert in the future. I don't know yet. There
are memorials to George Stevenson all over the world in
various places, because he really did change the world for
better or worse.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
We think about the railroad.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Barons in the US, and maybe it feels like for
worse but progress. I have a que listener mail that
references my Ben Franklin plan. Oh hurray, I wrote our
self help episodes, and since he first came up in
the self help episode for me, not first, but recently,
I thought it would be a good way to book
(41:12):
end it. This is from our listener Kelsey, who writes, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, Happy New Year. I'm listening to you
discuss your endless quest to get rid of stuff and
not to accumulate more stuff while very slowly unpacking from
my trip home for Christmas. I am very lucky to
have such generous friends and family, but the prospect of
finding places for the new stuff and needing to pare
(41:35):
down the old stuff to make room is paralyzing.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Baby, I feel you.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
I guess we share Ben franklin struggle with orderliness. I
disagree with him that you're a more virtuous person if
you're tidy, but sometimes it's nice if your life at
least looks like it's in order. Thanks for the spooky,
timely inspiration to just try. We'll never be Marie Condo,
but I'm sure we can approach the orderliness we desire,
if only for a little while until we inevitably have
(42:01):
to do a stuff purge again. Thanks for making history
interesting and relevant to our present lives. I hope twenty
twenty six treats you both well. Attached our pictures of
my very good boy Scooter, who I adopted last summer.
He's my second black cat, and from my own scientific research,
I can confirm that black cats are the best. Kelsey,
(42:22):
black cats are the best. There's a reason that black
cats are delightful, and it's because of a recessive allele
called the non Agouti allele in their genetics, which eliminates
it's actually a recessive gene, but it's very common, so
don't let recessive confuse you. It eliminates the striping that
you would find in non solid color cats, particularly dark
(42:45):
color cats, and it also is related to how dopamine
receptivity happens in utero, so there is actually some science
behind the idea that black cats tend to be really sweet. Anyways,
our ones are really sweets, la meet it. They're sweet
(43:06):
and Scooter is cute as pie. He looks like he
might get into some adorable trouble. There is one particular
picture of him on his back and what I call
baby harp seal position because we have a cat that
doesn't a lot and he looks so sweet and I
just tint a pet a litt dubbie. Now he's precious.
I have no doubt he is an angel and an
(43:27):
absolute delight. Thank you so much for writing to us.
If you would like to write to us and share
your pet pictures. You don't have to have pet pictures.
You can just write to us. He can't send us
pictures if you want or not. You can do that
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find the show on the iHeartRadio app and subscribe there
or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you
(43:55):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
So today's topic has come up on the show before.
He came up recently, very briefly, in our self Help
Books episode. He also came up in our two parter
on Sir Humphrey Davy. He was one of the people
who also invented a minor safety lamp, got involved in
a rather he did argument over who did it first.
But he is most well known for his work on
(00:38):
locomotives and railways. He's often called the father of railways,
and that is George Stephenson, and we are going to
talk about him today. George Stevenson was born on June ninth,
seventeen eighty one in Wylam, England, which is in the
county of Northumberland. His parents, Robert and Mabel car Stephenson,
were quite poor. Robert worked as a fireman at the
(01:01):
Walam Colliery. This was one of several jobs working in
coal that he had in his life, and that is
because coal pits would be opened up very quickly mind
to exhaustion and then closed, so people had to follow
the trail of new mine openings to make a living.
That meant consequently, working in coal was a nomadic life.
(01:23):
George was the second of six children, and when he
was born, the Stevensons were living with three other families
in a small cottage that was less than two yards
from a wooden railway that was used for horse drawn
carts carrying coal from the mines, and George followed in
his father's footsteps. He did not go to school and
(01:43):
he started working when he was a child of eight.
This was really quite normal for children in coal mining villages.
Neither of George's parents could read or write, and they
also had started working when they were just kids. George's
first job was watching a neighbors cows and horse and
helping in the garden, but he started colliery work not
much later. He started out as a picker, meaning he
(02:07):
picked things like a metal and slate out of the coal.
He then moved on to a job driving one of
the horses that pulled mine carts, but eventually he moved
up again and made his way to become his father's assistant.
George grew up around early steam powered technology, but from
the blue collar side of it. His father operated a
(02:28):
new Coman atmospheric steam engine at the local colliery. This
was an engine developed by preacher and inventor Thomas Nukeman
in seventeen twelve. It was designed to pump water out
of mines. The water that was pumped out by the
engine would then be routed to water wheels to provide
power for other equipment. Stevenson became a Newkeman operator when
(02:52):
he was still a teenager. George's siblings also went to
work when they were still children, and all of the
boys worked at the colliery. Yeah, his sisters did domestic work,
but George was also really interested in the world, and
he was curious by nature. He was absolutely fascinated by
anything mechanical, and he loved to take things apart and
(03:13):
then put them back together. So working in the mines
meant that he had a lot of equipment around that
he could examine and sometimes work on. He would also
create models of engines out of clay. But he also
loved animals. When he was a boy tending cows, he
liked to search for birds nests as he went about
his days, and he really loved blackbirds. In particular, he
(03:36):
had as a boy a blackbird that became so accustomed
to him that it became a pet, and it slept
at the head of his bed each night. He also
kept rabbits that he caught. There are many stories of
him throughout his life making friends with wild animals and
turning them into pets. As he was becoming an adult,
he decided to go after the education he hadn't been
(03:57):
able to get when he was younger. He had gotten
into his adolescence still not knowing how to read or write,
but he knew if he wanted to know more about
the world, he needed to learn. He started taking classes
at night after his full day shifts at the mines.
One of his motivations, according to the biography written by
Samuel Smiles in eighteen fifty seven, was that because George
(04:20):
and the other men at the colliery knew about Napoleon's
movements in Europe, they wanted more details, but nobody could
read the newspaper. He also wanted to learn more about
keeping animals. For all of these things, he was going
to need to learn how to read. And then, in
addition to matters of personal interest, he knew that if
(04:40):
he wanted to advance in his career that reading was
a necessity. To be clear with this, he started at
the very beginning, and his earliest lessons he had to
learn the alphabet because he had never been taught even that.
He was nineteen when he learned to write his name
for the first time. Once he mastered reading, George also
(05:01):
started taking lessons in arithmetic. This early education set him
on a path of lifelong learning. He continued to study
various subjects all through his life, often on his own
in the evenings after work. Yeah, it sounds based on
descriptions like he wasn't just casually like, oh, I think
I'm going to read this book next, Like he was
kind of putting together little curricula for himself and being
(05:25):
like this month, I'm going to study this, So this
month I'm going to learn about this, which is quite admirable.
George met a woman named Francis Anderson during this time
in his life. She was working as a domestic servant
in the farmer's home, where George had moved when his
job took him away from his family home. He and Francis,
who went by Fanny, got married in November eighteen oh two,
(05:49):
Francis was older than him. I read differing numbers, some
that said she was nine years older, some that said
she was twelve, but roughly a decade. He had actually
wooed her sister Anne unsuccessfully before he and Frances struck
up a courtship, and this was, by all accounts though,
a very good match, and the pair had a very
(06:09):
loving marriage. They seemed to be what everybody hopes for
best friends, and they always chose each other's company in
the evenings and in their spare time over other options
of places they could be. Knowing that he needed to
support a family, Stevenson sought to expand his income by
diversifying his revenue streams, meaning he learned a lot of skills.
(06:32):
He had already learned shoe repair before he met Fanny.
He had actually resold a pair of her shoes while
they were courting, and soon he also added clock repair
to his repertoire. He also, at least according to some accounts,
started cutting out clothing for the wives of his coworkers
so they could get right to sewing it up, so
he had his hands in a lot of activities. Just
(06:54):
before the wedding, George started working as a brakesman at
Willington Colliery that came with the significant pay bump. A
brakesman operates the winch at the top of the pit
that brings the coal up out of a mine. This
position was considered to be skilled labor, and so that's
why it came with a pay increase. He also continued
(07:14):
to take side jobs. At one point, he was so
busy hauling cargo out of the holds of ships that
he cut back his engine operator hours and his friend
William Fairbain took this dropped hours from him. This extra
income had good timing since George and Francis had a
son eleven months after they got married. That was on
(07:35):
October sixteenth, eighteen oh three. They named their son Robert.
George really adored Robert, and Robert would become an important
collaborator with George as an adult. Less than a year
after Robert's birth, the Stevenson's moved again, this time to
Killingworth for another brakesman position. Uh. Coming up, We're going
(07:56):
to get to a point in George's biography where his
life takes some sad turns. So we're gonna pause before
we get into that, and hear from our sponsors. In
the summer of eighteen oh five, Francis and George had
(08:18):
another baby, a daughter, but the infant died when she
was still a baby, although accounts of her age at
death very quite a bit. Some say that she died
after just a few weeks, others a few months. But
Francis also became ill and she died of tuberculosis in
eighteen oh six. So now George had to raise their
son alone, and initially he hired a housekeeper to look
(08:42):
after young Robert, and that was because he had been
offered a lucrative temporary job in Montrose, Scotland. He may
have also just needed some time away from his regular
life to deal with his grief, which was considerable. George
made this journey to Scotland on foot, and I looked
it up on Google Maps and according to that that
would have been about sixty eight hours worth of walking
(09:03):
one way. When he returned, he learned that his housekeeper
had married his younger brother. That honestly was great, but
it meant that he did need a new housekeeper to
help take care of his son. That job was eventually
filled by his sister Eleanor. The Stevenson family had a
couple of financial and health hardships. Around this time, George's father, Robert,
(09:26):
had been badly injured in a work accident and suffered
steam burns and the loss of his vision. George saw
to it that his father's debts were paid and that
he was set up with everything he needed, and also
arranged to take care of all of the older Robert's
expenses for the rest of his life. This, of course,
significantly depleted the money he had saved up. Yeah, he
(09:49):
had returned from Scotland with a good bit of money,
and more than two thirds of it was immediately used
for this effort. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic Wars had led to
written expanding their militia, and George was selected for conscription.
He did have the option to pay for his substitute
to serve in his stead, and he took that option
(10:10):
because he wanted to stay near his family, particularly his son,
and this was something a lot of wealthy families did
as a matter of course, but George wasn't wealthy. He
went broke doing this, and while he did feel like
it was the right decision to stay with Robert both
Robert truly, he was also incredibly depressed to find himself
with nothing. After years of working really hard and moving
(10:32):
up the ladder in the collieries and being really frugal
and careful with his money, he went right back to
a brakesman job to keep himself, his son, and his
father afloat.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He took a.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Temporary job in eighteen oh eight at the Westmore Pit
along with two other brakesmen. The terms of their contract
gave the three brakesmen their pay based on how many
loads they could pull in, so Stevenson wanted to find
ways they could increase their productivity and I'll make more
money from the job. So the first thing he did
was watch the equipment and noted anything that stood out,
(11:06):
And right away he noticed that the ropes on the
winding machine wore out much more quickly at the Westmore
Pit than on average, so he deduced that they were
probably encountering more friction than was normal. He got permission
to make some changes to the pulley system on the winch,
and this led to an immediate improvement in the system.
(11:29):
He got in the habit of taking the machinery he
was in charge of apart on Saturdays at the end
of every work week then he would clean it and
reassemble it, and as a consequence, that machine stayed in
tip top shape all of the time, and Stevenson became
an expert at every inner working. In nineteen ten, a
new pit was opened at Killingworth. This was known as
(11:51):
the High Pit and it had a new come in
engine to pump the water out of the mine shaft.
But that engine was problematic. It never succeeded in clearing
the water from the pit, no matter how hard its
operators tried, so if the water couldn't come out of
the pit, they couldn't go down and mine it. George,
who was back at Killingworth as a brakesman at this point,
(12:12):
would often stop by the pit and watch this new
coman try and fail to pump. And he had actually
told some of the mind managers when he saw this
engine installed that he thought it was defective, but he
was also just a brakesman, so his council was not
really considered in the decisions of the mechanics. He also
told one of the shaft sinkers those are the people
(12:33):
that drill down and create the shafts, that he thought
he could probably fix that machine. After weeks of no progress,
with that engine. The sinker mentioned to his pause that
George Stevenson thought that he had a solution, and after
that information ran up the chain of command, it was
decided that letting a brakesman try his hand at a
repair couldn't make things anything worse. According to the Smiles biography,
(12:57):
mining manager Ralph Dodds told George, quote, We'll give you
a fair trial and you must set to work immediately.
We are clean, drowned out and cannot get a step further.
The engineers hereabouts are all bet and if you really
succeed in accomplishing what they cannot do, you may depend
on it.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
I will make you a man for life.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
So George, as we've established, was very familiar with nukeman engines.
He had worked with them from the time he was
a teenager. He had hands on experience tinkering with them
in those early jobs. He insisted that he had to
pick the team of mechanics that he was going to
work with. That caused some bruised egos. He also said
(13:38):
his team needed to be of all one political affiliation.
They either all needed to be Whigs or they all
needed to be Tories to avoid unnecessary friction and bickering
among them. Holly did not find out which party they
kind of landed on. I'm kind of curious, was were
George's affiliations just flexible? I feel like George was not
(14:02):
terribly interested in politics. Okay, he was interested in engines.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Once he had assembled his team, they took the entire
engine apart, piece by piece, and this was a huge machine,
so it was a significant undertaking. Three days later the
whole thing was back together, and at first it did
not seem like it was going to work any better
than when it first started. But within two days the
water in the mine had been completely pumped out. Ralph
(14:32):
Dodds made good on his promise. He gave Stevenson a
gift of ten pounds and then promoted him to the
role of engine men at.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
The High Pit.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
That came with a much higher salary than he had
ever gotten before. His responsibilities and income grew even more
the following year when the High Pit's engine right was
killed in an accident and George inherited that job. Yeah,
he kind of moved into the position of management over
the other mechanics. Throughout all of his career, accomplishments and promotions.
(15:03):
George had sought out teachers to improve his knowledge, and
he really wanted to improve his math skills. He would
get arithmetic assignments from this friend of his, John Wigham,
who was very skilled at math, and he would work
out problems during downtime at work or in the evenings,
and then he would present them to John for correction.
Wigham also taught George how to draw up plans and
(15:26):
basic mechanical diagrams, and then the two men actually worked
together from a book to learn the laws of mechanics,
which is the most charming, sweet thing I've ever heard.
Over the years, George was also seeing to his son,
Robert's education, and when he had still been earning a
pretty meager wage, he had made the decision that Robert
would get an education. George later wrote, quote, in the
(15:49):
earlier period of my career, when Robert was a little boy,
I saw how deficient I was in education, and I
made up my mind that he should not labor under
the same defect, but that I would put him in
a good school and give him a liberal training. I was, however,
a poor man, and how do you think I managed.
I betook myself to mending my neighbor's clocks and watches
(16:11):
at night after my daily labor was done, and thus
I procured the means of educating my son. In eighteen fifteen,
when Robert was twelve, he started attending a day school
in Newcastle. Yeah, in addition to all those side jobs,
this increase in pay really really helped make this plan
come to fruition. This step in Robert's education also, though,
(16:34):
offers another glimpse into the ways that George continually sought
to expand his own knowledge. So Robert would go to
school during the day, and then in the evenings George
would sit with Robert and review his homework. But this
wasn't a case of his father helping exactly, George was
taking the opportunity to follow along with Robert's studies so
(16:55):
that he could learn the same mathematical concepts that his
son was being taught. Or Che also gave his son
assignments like building a sun dial for their cottage, so
that he would learn to apply his knowledge to practical uses,
and Robert, with the help of his father, did gain
enough of an understanding of astronomy and math to make
that sun dial. They hung it outside their cottage and
(17:17):
George pointed it out to everyone who visited. He was
very proud of it, and it moved to Robert's home
later in life. One of George Stevenson's first big achievements
as an inventor happened after he had visited another colliery
to see their mobile steam boiler. This is a proto
locomotive invented by John Blankensop. Blankensop's wheeled steam boiler was
(17:41):
intended to bring coal out of the mines, but that
was a big ask. That Memphis machine had to be
able to run on the rails that had been tracked
into the mine. But there were concerns about it that
while it was powerful, it would never really have enough
grip to pull itself and a load of hole Blankensop
(18:02):
came up with a solution, which was a ratchet wheel
that had teeth that would set into a special track
called a rack rail that had holes in it at
intervals matching up with the wheel teeth. Blankensop's engine was
really a marvel. It was natural for every engineer and
mechanic in England to want to see it, and it
was ingenious, but it also had problems. The rack rail
(18:25):
tended to take a lot of strain, It needed a
lot of repairs, and the one that Stevenson had gone
to look at had a boiler explosion not long after that.
While the coal industry was very interested in the idea
of a locomotive, they were also a bit wary of
the whole field up to that point. Yeah, anytime there's
(18:45):
a big, you know, disruptive change in technology, it's scary,
especially if it explodes. Horses worked just fine, and this
one came with obvious danger. This was not Stevenson's first
experience with the idea of a mobile steam engine. He
had been thinking about these kinds of machines for a
while because the coal industry was really the driving force
(19:09):
behind their development, and a lot of people had been
talking about them. Stevenson thought there had to be a
way to make a mobile steam boiler that didn't have
the issues of reliability that Blankensops did, and he started
thinking about how the problem with the cogs might be solved.
He made a serious and methodical study of Blankensop's engine
and all of the other engine attempts that had been
(19:31):
developed in the early nineteenth century, and he made a
list of all of their shortcomings and then he set
out to create something that would transcend all of those problems.
And when he went to the owners of the Killingworth
Minds to tell them that he wanted to invent a locomotive,
that word didn't exist, yet they gave him the money
to do it. To be clear, that word, of course,
(19:53):
wasn't in use for railroad vehicles. It existed as a word,
but it was going to soon change. Stevenson in his
sh we called his project a traveling engine. Over the
course of several months, Stevenson and his crew worked to
bring together the machine, and the result was the Blucher,
which debuted on July twenty fifth, eighteen fourteen. It is
(20:14):
said to have been named after Gebhard Lebrech van Blucher,
who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in eighteen thirteen.
Blucher outperformed the steam engines that inspired it, and it
was able to haul thirty tons of coal distributed among
eight wagons, at a rate of four miles an hour.
It was put into work right away at the Killingworth Colliery,
(20:36):
but Stevenson was not entirely happy with the Bluecher. Some
parts of the mechanic of it were kind of cramped.
It would make them difficult to work on if there
was need for repair, and it wasn't always the smoothest
in terms of movement.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
It would sometimes make.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
These jerky lurches forward as the various cylinders driving it
fired one after another. Additionally, the important question of whether
this machine was more efficient and cost effective than carts
pulled by horses was very much in doubt. Stevenson really
looked at the Bluecher as a first draft, and he
really thought he could do better, so he kept working.
(21:13):
The major revision he made to the design was the
steam blast. This is the process of redirecting exhaust steam
up the engine's chimney.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
The fuel for the engine was coal.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Burning coal heated the water in the boiler and that
created the steam that drove the pistons inside the cylinders,
which turned the wheels. Prior to redirecting it, the steam
had run through the engine cylinders and the words of
biographers Smiles quote was at first allowed to escape into
the open atmosphere with a hissing blast, to the terror
(21:46):
of horses and cattle. And watching the Blucher and analyzing
its performance, Stevenson noticed how much more power this steam
blast had than the smoke that left the chimney that
bented off of the fire that heated the boiler. But
Stevenson suspected correctly that if he could run that steam
into the chimney through a pipe, then the air that
(22:08):
was pulled in after it would increase the draft. That
would significantly increase the intensity of the combustion in the furnace,
kind of like a bellows would at a forge. It
would create more energy. After initially testing this idea on
the Blucher, Stevenson started working on a second engine with
the steam blast incorporated into the design from the start,
(22:31):
and he patented this new design on February twenty eighth,
eighteen fifteen. The next several years were prolific for Stevenson
as an inventor. He built an estimated sixteen locomotives at Killingworth.
One of these locomotives, the Killingworth Billy, which Stevenson built
in eighteen sixteen, is in the collection of the Stevenson
(22:52):
Steam Railway Museum. It is the oldest surviving locomotive built
by Stevenson, and this is in part because he would
offer take apart earlier models to make new ones, so
there are not a lot of survivors among those reported.
Sixteen witnessing a number of horrific mining accidents in which
workers were injured and killed. Being very aware of the
(23:15):
danger of fire damp that's methane gas that becomes highly
flammable when mixed with air. That all led Stevenson to
think about ways to improve the safety in the tunnels.
In one instance, he went right into a colliery Maine
that was on fire and asked for six brave men
to follow him so they could douse the flames. He
quickly worked with the volunteers to build a wall to
(23:38):
seal off the main, choking the fire out by depriving
it of air. There were still several fatalities that day,
but if George had not plunged into the pit with
the idea to wall off this fire, a lot more
people would have died. In eighteen fifteen, George gave a
demonstration of the first iteration of a safety lamp that
he had devised to allow illumination of mining pits while
(24:01):
preventing fires. His lamp, which involved a glass cylinder that
was then encased in a tin sleeve, allowed air to
enter only through small holes. It had a slide on
the bottom that could be moved to, in his words,
regulate the quantity of air to be admitted. By the
time the design was refined. It also had several of
what he called capillary tubes that released air through a
(24:24):
series of apertures. A flame could not successfully make it
through these tubes. Stevenson's lamp design, nicknamed the Jordie, was
soon in regular use at Killingworth and other mines in
northern England. Of course, soon after that, Sir Humphrey Davy
revealed his own safety lamp, and soon a battle was
being waged over who had invented it first.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
The supporters of each.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Man became locked in a passionate debate about who should
get this accolade. Stevenson's working class upbringing worked against him
in scientific circles. A lot of the era of gentlemen scientist,
a lot of them had lots of extra money lying around.
It seemed impossible that a colliery worker, and yes, even
one who had engineered these huge step forward and locomotive engines,
(25:11):
could be an inventor on the same level of the
renowned chemist an inventor Sir Humphrey Davy. Davey was given
a two thousand pound award by the coal owners of England.
They gave Stevenson a mere one hundred guineas as kind
of a consolation prize. Stevenson was insulted, and his friends
and supporters were furious and urged him to set that
(25:34):
record straight. Yeah, he apparently spoke very much with an accent.
He did not sound like a refined gentleman from London,
and that really hurt him when he spoke about this invention,
even though he actually was first. That urging of his
friends resulted in a letter which was published in the papers,
and then it was also published later as part of
(25:56):
a collection of many correspondences and documents on the MA.
In George's open letter, which was dictated to his son,
he opened with quote, several of my friends having expressed
a wish that I would lay an engraved plan of
my safety lamp before the public, with as correct an
account of the dates of that invention as I am able,
I have resolved to do so, and he included in
(26:19):
this his designs was kind of a little pamphlet. He
notated the date of October twenty first, eighteen fifteen as
the first time he tested his lamp in the mine,
which was successful, with other tests following in the weeks
directly after showing that he was working on his lamp
well before anyone knew of Davy's efforts, so he could
not have copied him. Supporters in Northern England, through a
(26:42):
committee led by the Earl of Strathmore, CJ. Brambling, collected
money and awarded Stevenson one thousand pounds and a silver watch.
He was given these at a formal dinner. If George
was chagrined that he didn't get enough recognition for his lamp,
he didn't really need to worry. He was about to
embark on a series of projects that would really change
(27:03):
the world, and we'll get to that after a sponsor break.
As the hubbub over the lamp debate died down, Stevenson
turned his focus to the roads and railways used for
coal transport. This was a time when none of these
(27:26):
things were standardized, and rail tracks were run right on
the roads. As a matter of course, you can still
sometimes find roads that also have rail tracks embedded in them,
but this was the only way you could find a
rail At this point, Mines tended to put together their
own rails to carry coal out, and these were often
bumpy and they caused needless wear and tear on the
engines and cars because the rails would shift and cause bouncing.
(27:49):
None of them were really purpose designed. Those rails were
also often made of cast iron. That meant that they
were brittle, so that.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Too needed to be considered.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Stevenson worked to redesign the way that tracks were laid
so that they were smoother and less likely to break,
and he redesigned the wheels of locomotives so that they
worked better on these newly designed tracks. He also redesigned
the pistons and cylinders in the engine so that they
doubled as springs, which reduced the jerking and bouncing of
the engine when it did encounter bumps. In eighteen twenty,
(28:22):
Stevenson got married for a second time to a woman
named Elizabeth Heindmarsh. Betty, as she was called, was a
farmer's daughter. Betty's brother had introduced the two of them
a little more than a year before. There's not a
lot of information about Betty, but the two of them
seemed to have been very happy together. That same year
that he got married eighteen twenty, he was hired to
(28:43):
build a brand new railway which needed to be eight
miles long. This was for the Hetton Colliery and the
project took two years. The new line opened on November eighteenth,
eighteen twenty two, and it was the first railway intended
exclusively for use by engine and not animal drawn carts,
although some carts probably ran on it. George had sort
(29:06):
of invented an entirely new career in this move. He
was a builder of railroads. The next big railway project
to come George Stevenson's way was the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
Stevenson did the survey work to lay out the path
of the railway himself, with several assistants. This project was
to be twenty five miles long, so the survey work
(29:28):
took some time. Construction started in eighteen twenty three, and
Stevenson's newly formed company, Stevenson and Company, was contracted to
build three steam engines for it. By this point, his
son Robert was working with him. One evening, over a
bottle of wine, Stevenson reportedly told his son and another
(29:48):
man named John Dixon, quote, I venture to tell you
that I think you will live to see the day
when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance
in this country, when mail coaches will go by railway,
and railroads will become the great highway for the King
and all his subjects. The time is coming when it
will be cheaper for a working man to travel upon
(30:09):
a railway than to walk on foot. I know there
are great and almost insurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but
what I have said will come to pass as sure
as you live. I only wish I may live to
see the day, though that I can scarcely hope, for
as I know how slow all human progress is, and
(30:30):
with what difficulty I have been able to get the
locomotive thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than ten years
successful experiment at Killingworth. Yeah, he knew, he knew these
were going to become important. The Stockton and Darlington line
opened on September twenty seventh, eighteen twenty five, with an
engine named Locomotion pulling a passenger car called Experiment. Stevenson
(30:53):
drove the locomotion himself, and the people riding aboard Experiment
were the first passengers to be conveyed by a steam
locomotive at times it moved as quickly as twelve miles
per hour. It seemed a dizzying speed at the time,
although often it moved at a much slower pace of
four to six miles per hour. This railway was a
huge success, although the experiment passenger coach ended up being
(31:16):
run by a contractor company and it was often drawn
by a horse rather than a steam engine. And while
initially this line was open for use by anyone who
had a horse drawn wagon, it was sort of like
a public street. That policy was eventually rolled back because
it caused problems as more and more loads were running
on the line via steam engine way too dangerous for
(31:39):
horses to be involved. In eighteen twenty six, the Liverpool
and Manchester Railway Act was passed in Parliament. After several
years of preparations and surveying, This funded construction of the
first ever intercity railway. George Stevenson had been on the
project since the summer of eighteen twenty four. As principal engineer.
He picked up the work of survey or named William James,
(32:01):
who had conducted earlier analysis of the land and determined
a path for the railway, but by the time Stevenson
was brought on William James was in debtors prison. Stevenson
attempted to perform a new survey with some changes to
the route, but he ran into trouble with landowners who
did not want him or a railway on their property.
(32:23):
These were not people angrily shaking fists. They were making
serious threats and brandishing guns. So he ended up turning
in a revised version of James's work, and that was
a mistake. James had been sloppy. He was a little
bit it sounds like a flim flam man. There were
errors in his survey and it was just not an
(32:45):
accurate representation of the land that the line was supposed
to pass through, and that meant that the cost estimate
that Stevenson had prepared based on the survey was also
deeply flawed. He had underestimated its total cost by about
one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. He was questioned about
it all before the House of Commons and it became
apparent he didn't really know what was going on with
(33:08):
that planned route. He was fired and replaced by brothers
George and John Rennie, and after they ran into problems
with the board of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company.
They were booted and Stevenson was back on the project,
although there were ongoing internal struggles. The surveyor that had
been brought on when the Rennies were hired, Charles Blackervignol,
(33:31):
quit because he and Stevenson did just not get along.
This was all such a huge and high stakes undertaking,
it is kind of understandable that tensions would run high
and people might clash, but it eventually shook out. This
was a large enough project that Stevenson divided it into
thirds and assigned a construction superintendent to each ten mile section.
(33:54):
Those were Joseph Locke, William Alcard and John Dixon. Stevenson
moved to Liverpool for the construction of the line and
the work began. One of the most challenging segments, and
an area that had been much discussed during the hearings
on the survey, was a bog known as chat Moss.
The initial plan was that the bog would be drained,
(34:17):
but that turned out to be impossible. Stephenson came up
with the idea to float the railway on the bog.
After embankments had been shored up with dry Moss. It
took a lot longer than expected, and Stephenson was urged
to abandon this whole plan numerous times, but he carried on,
employing hundreds of men to haul materials to dump into
(34:38):
the bog and till this has finally worked. The floating
railway worked and was often noted as being the.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Smoothest part of the line.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
This was not the only instance where the railway had
to cross less than ideal land to complete its course,
and there were sixty four bridges and viaducts built for
the project. Yeah, that Chatmoss Bridge is still there. Stevenson
had made the shift away from cast iron for the
rails and rod iron was used for the line. This
(35:09):
was much more reliable. It was smoother than cast iron,
and that was because it could be laid in much
longer lengths. He also established the gauge the distance between
rails at four feet eight and a half inches that's
one four hundred and thirty five millimeters. There are a
number of different stories as to why that was the measurement.
(35:30):
Some of them are quite fanciful and delightful. As we mentioned,
earlier railways and roads had not been standardized. Mining rails
could be anywhere from four to five feet wide. The
most popular version of the story is that it was
pretty standard for wagon wheels to be set at that width,
like they would fall inside the rails, so if you
were sharing the road with a train, both vehicles could
(35:53):
work on it. That was what Stevenson had used at
Killingsworth Colliery, and he continued to use it after that,
and this number eventually became known as the Stephenson gauge,
and it was adopted as a standard gauge in the
UK Gage Act of eighteen forty six. It's also standard
for the most part around the world. I think I
read a statistic that fifty five percent of railways still
(36:15):
use it. As the railway was under construction, another matter
of debate arose, which was who would build the locomotives
for it. Would it actually use steam locomotives. There had
been a push for the use of fixed engines along
the length of the line that would power winched cables
that would attach to the various vehicles and propel them forward.
(36:39):
Stevenson lobbied against this idea with just a lot of fervor,
and of course Stevenson wanted to be the one to
build the locomotives for the line. There were other contenders, though,
and a contest was announced with a five hundred pound
prize to see who could build the best locomotive. This
was also a test to see if locomotive power really
(36:59):
was that's the best way. As early work on the
Liverpool in Manchester rail was underway, George's favorite collaborator, his
son Robert, was out of the country. Robert had been
in South America since the summer of eighteen twenty four,
and that travel happened for two reasons. One, the silver
and gold mines in South America were in desperate need
(37:20):
of engineers, and two Robert had been ill for some time,
possibly with tuberculosis. It gets mentioned, but it's unclear, and
his doctor had suggested that he spend time in a
warmer climate. So off he went. And when Robert returned
to England in late eighteen twenty seven, he was immediately
put to work on the design and construction of a
(37:41):
new locomotive for this contest. Robert designed an engine known
as Rocket in close collaboration with his father. At this point,
Robert was working in their locomotive shop and George was
in Liverpool and continuing to work.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
On the railway.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
The Rocket and the other competitors got to Liverpool for
the the Rainhill Trials in October of eighteen twenty nine.
There were five competitors total, including the Rocket, the sam
Peril built by Timothy Hackworth, the Novelty built by the
engineering firm of Brathwaite and Ericson, the Perseverance from Timothy
(38:17):
Burstall of Edinburgh, and the Cycloped built by Thomas Brandreth.
The Cycloped was immediately eliminated because it used horse power,
which was against the rules of the competition, but it
really was no competition. None of the other engines could
even finish and they had to withdraw. The Rocket not
only competed the trial, it hit twenty nine miles an
(38:40):
hour at one point, and it handily whipped through the
trials like pushing and pulling carts filled with stones. When
the Liverpool and Manchester line opened on September fifteenth, eighteen thirty,
Stevenson Locomotives were the engines that ran it. Yeah, that
one's kind of funny because a lot of people rode
in saying they were going to participate, but only this
handful actually finished anything that they could bring and there
(39:03):
was another entry. I'm using air quotes because it was
pulled by two guys. It wasn't even a forest power
and they were like no, no, no, no, no, don't
even get on the track. From that moment, George Stevenson
was so in demand that he had to constantly turn
down jobs. He worked on multiple railway lines that slowly
connected all of England's major municipalities. He also consulted and
(39:27):
worked on many projects both in Europe and North America.
When the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was founded in eighteen
forty seven in London, he was the group's first president.
By that point, his second wife, Betty, had died, and
he was as retired as someone who seems dedicated to
their work ever is. After he was widowed a second time,
(39:48):
he became even more interested in things he had long loved,
like gardening and cultivating unusual flora. He invented a method
to grow a perfectly straightened cucumber. He basically grew the
fruit in a glass tube, so his retirement sounds kind
of idyllic. On July twenty sixth, eighteen forty eight, he
read a paper at a meeting of the Institute of
(40:10):
Mechanical Engineers titled on the Fallacies of the Rotary Engine.
That was the last time he attended a meeting. Stevenson
died on August twelfth, eighteen forty eight, after about a
fever in Chesterfield, where he lived at the end of
his life. All the businesses closed on the day of
the funeral, and there was a parade of railroad workers
(40:31):
that followed his casket to Trinity Church where he was buried.
Of course, his son went on to also do a
lot of great things. Perhaps we will do an episode
on Robert in the future. I don't know yet. There
are memorials to George Stevenson all over the world in
various places, because he really did change the world for
better or worse.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
We think about the railroad.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Barons in the US, and maybe it feels like for
worse but progress. I have a que listener mail that
references my Ben Franklin plan. Oh hurray, I wrote our
self help episodes, and since he first came up in
the self help episode for me, not first, but recently,
I thought it would be a good way to book
(41:12):
end it. This is from our listener Kelsey, who writes, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, Happy New Year. I'm listening to you
discuss your endless quest to get rid of stuff and
not to accumulate more stuff while very slowly unpacking from
my trip home for Christmas. I am very lucky to
have such generous friends and family, but the prospect of
finding places for the new stuff and needing to pare
(41:35):
down the old stuff to make room is paralyzing.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Baby, I feel you.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
I guess we share Ben franklin struggle with orderliness. I
disagree with him that you're a more virtuous person if
you're tidy, but sometimes it's nice if your life at
least looks like it's in order. Thanks for the spooky,
timely inspiration to just try. We'll never be Marie Condo,
but I'm sure we can approach the orderliness we desire,
if only for a little while until we inevitably have
(42:01):
to do a stuff purge again. Thanks for making history
interesting and relevant to our present lives. I hope twenty
twenty six treats you both well. Attached our pictures of
my very good boy Scooter, who I adopted last summer.
He's my second black cat, and from my own scientific research,
I can confirm that black cats are the best. Kelsey,
(42:22):
black cats are the best. There's a reason that black
cats are delightful, and it's because of a recessive allele
called the non Agouti allele in their genetics, which eliminates
it's actually a recessive gene, but it's very common, so
don't let recessive confuse you. It eliminates the striping that
you would find in non solid color cats, particularly dark
(42:45):
color cats, and it also is related to how dopamine
receptivity happens in utero, so there is actually some science
behind the idea that black cats tend to be really sweet. Anyways,
our ones are really sweets, la meet it. They're sweet
(43:06):
and Scooter is cute as pie. He looks like he
might get into some adorable trouble. There is one particular
picture of him on his back and what I call
baby harp seal position because we have a cat that
doesn't a lot and he looks so sweet and I
just tint a pet a litt dubbie. Now he's precious.
I have no doubt he is an angel and an
(43:27):
absolute delight. Thank you so much for writing to us.
If you would like to write to us and share
your pet pictures. You don't have to have pet pictures.
You can just write to us. He can't send us
pictures if you want or not. You can do that
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find the show on the iHeartRadio app and subscribe there
or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you
(43:55):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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