The Father of Railways couldn't read until he was eighteen
George Stephenson, whose track width became the standard gauge for most of the world's railways, grew up in a Northumberland mining village with illiterate parents and no money for school. He paid for night classes as a teenager, mended clocks for extra cash, and later built the first public inter-city railway to run on locomotives.
Born in 1781 in Wylam, near Newcastle, Stephenson followed his father into colliery work, operating pumps and winding gear. Life was hard: his infant daughter died after three weeks, and his wife died of tuberculosis in 1806. His break came in 1811, when he fixed a failing pumping engine at Killingworth so well that he was made enginewright for all the pits there, becoming an expert in steam machinery.
In 1815 he tackled mine explosions caused by naked flames. Working by trial and error, he built a lamp that let air in through holes too small for flame to pass, and demonstrated it underground a month before the celebrated chemist Humphry Davy presented his own gauze design. Davy received a £2,000 prize, while Stephenson was accused of stealing the idea because he lacked scientific credentials. A local inquiry cleared him, and in 1833 a House of Commons committee found his claim equal to Davy's. One theory holds that the nickname of his Geordie lamp stuck to the miners of the North East themselves.
The episode left him deeply suspicious of London's theoretical experts, and his broad Northumberland accent counted against him in Parliament, so he sent his son Robert to a private school to learn standard English. Robert later proved the more acceptable face to officials.
Building on steam work by Richard Trevithick and others, Stephenson designed his first locomotive, Blücher, in 1814. It hauled 30 tons of coal uphill at 4 miles per hour and was the first successful engine to grip the rails through flanged wheels alone. Some early engines were withdrawn for breaking brittle cast-iron track. Then came Locomotion No. 1, which became the first steam engine hauling paying passengers along a public railway, the Stockton and Darlington, in 1825, and in 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. His gauge of 4 feet 8 and a half inches endures today.
Source: George Stephenson
