George Stephenson

George Stephenson was born on 9 June 1781 in Wylam, Northumberland, the second of six children born to Robert Stephenson and Mabel Carr. His father worked the pumping engine at Wylam Colliery, and it was here, watching the machines that drew water from the deep seams beneath the northern hills, that George first fell under the spell of steam.

The family had nothing to spare. George received no formal schooling and remained illiterate until his eighteenth year, when he paid for his own evening lessons from a local schoolmaster. That a man who could not read his own name at seventeen would go on to reshape the physical geography of an entire nation says everything about the quality of his mind and the stubbornness of his ambition.

He worked his way up through the collieries of Tyneside — fireman, plugman, engineman — learning the machinery not from books but from his hands. He took engines apart in the evenings, cleaned them, reassembled them, and made them run better than they had before. By 1812 he was engine wright at Killingworth Colliery, responsible for all the steam engines on the estate. Two years later he built his first locomotive, Blücher, which hauled coal along the Killingworth waggonway on 25 July 1814. It was not the world’s first steam locomotive, but it was the beginning of everything that followed.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened on 27 September 1825, the first public railway in the world to use steam traction. George drove the locomotive himself. Five years later, his engine Rocket won the Rainhill Trials and secured the contract for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway — and with it, the future of rail travel worldwide. The gauge he settled on for that line, four feet eight and a half inches, became the standard gauge still used on railways across the world today.

George married twice. His first wife, Frances Henderson, died in 1806 shortly after the birth of their son Robert, who would become an equally celebrated engineer. He married again in 1820, to Elizabeth Hindmarsh, and the couple lived at Dial Cottage in Killingworth for many years.

In his later years George turned to farming and horticulture with the same methodical energy he had brought to engineering. He settled at Tapton House near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, where he spent the final decade of his life cultivating prize melons and cucumbers in his greenhouses, corresponding with scientists, and receiving a steady stream of visitors who came to pay their respects to the father of the railways.

He died at Tapton House on 12 August 1848, aged sixty-seven, and is buried at Holy Trinity Church, Chesterfield — a quiet resting place for a man who had set the world in motion.