George Stephenson

by Hunter Davies

  The board had to insist that George made some of the changes Telford recommended, and that he signed an agreement promising to get the line completed by 1830, before they were allowed their £l00,000 loan. George must have been furious, but he had no alternative.

  One of the many matters that puzzled Telford was the haulage. He couldn’t really see locomotives doing the job the line was being built for. Nor could many other people, including some of the most influential members of the Liverpool board, notably Cropper the Quaker. Though an early plan to use horses had long since been abandoned, there was still a strong lobby in favour of stationary engines. George certainly planned to use several of them, fixed beside the incline planes, hauling the wagons and coaches up by ropes, but he was determined that his main power was going to be locomotives. The successful parliamentary act had played down locomotives, not just for fear of bad publicity but because the board as a whole preferred stationary engines. George and Robert, however, had been going ahead with their locomotive plans. They wanted the Liverpool line to be different from all the little local colliery lines, including the Darlington line, with few stationary engines, using instead the new and improved locomotives which Robert was now working on, capable of going at much faster speeds. But the board, apart from Sandars and Booth, wasn’t convinced.

  A deputation was sent over to Darlington to investigate both types of engine, stationary and locomotive. Edward Pease instructed Hackworth to ‘have the engines and men as neat and clean as can, and be ready with the calculations, not only showing the saving, but how much more work they do in a given time’. The deputation reported in favour of fixed haulage.

  George tried to keep his fury within bounds, but there is little doubt he flew into a rage, judging by the careful euphemisms used by Smiles to describe George’s nature, long after the problem had been settled. ‘Though naturally most cheerful and kind hearted in his disposition, the anxiety and pressure which weighed upon his mind during the construction of the railway had the effect of making him occasionally impatient and irritable, like a spirited horse touched by the spur; though his original good nature from time to time shone through it all.’ (My italics.) On this occasion, he recovered quickly from his irritability and composed a powerful 4000-word thesis on why the deputation was wrong and why locomotives were better in terms of haulage, speed, economy and price. His arguments were brilliantly constructed, with all facts and figures clearly marshalled. It was a triumph of sustained reasoning, not least because it came from an uneducated mechanic. (It is quoted in its entirety in chapter eleven of Warren’s A Century of Locomotive Building, 1923.)

  The upshot was that two outside engineering experts, Messrs Walker and Rastrick, were asked by the board to conduct an independent report. A second party arrived at Darlington, where the engines and men were clean and at attention once again, to inspect the books and put the machines through their paces. Their report was presented in March 1829. Once again it was in favour of fixed engines. They outdid George in the length and detail of their thesis. One of their many damning statistics was that moving a ton of goods for thirty miles by fixed engines cost 6.4 pennies a mile, while the cost of moving by locomotives was 8.36.

  ‘We are preparing for the counter-report in favour of locomotives,’ wrote Robert to a friend, ‘which I believe will ultimately get the day, but, from present appearances nothing decisive can be said: rely upon it, locomotives shall not be cowardly given up. I will fight for them until the last. (His italics.) ‘They are worthy of a conflict.’

  The only slight hope in the Walker–Rastrick report was a sentence which admitted there were grounds ‘for expecting improvements in the construction and work of locomotives’. In April 1829 the board, deciding to settle the matter once and for all, announced that they would award a prize for the best locomotive, depending on its speed, weight, power, consumption and smoke. The prize would be £500 and the competition would take place at a completed stretch of the company’s line at Rainhill in October 1829. It was exactly what George and Robert wanted. An open, public performance of their new locomotive engine, a chance to prove it to the world.

  They weren’t the only ones convinced they were going to show the world what they could do. By the date of the trials, so Henry Booth, the company treasurer, wrote, the company had received suggestions from every mad inventor in the known world. Booth’s description of the ideas which flooded in is one of the nicest bits of writing to come from the early years of locomotion:

  Multifarious were the schemes proposed to the Directors, for facilitating Locomotion. Communications were received from all classes of persons, each recommending an improved carriage; from professors of philosophy, down to the humblest mechanic, all were zealous in their proffers of assistance; England, America, and Continental Europe were alike tributary. Every element and almost every substance were brought into requisition, and made subservient to the great work. The friction of the carriages was to be reduced so low that a silk thread would draw them, and the power to be applied was to be so vast as to render a cable asunder. Hydrogen gas and high-pressure steam – columns of water and columns of mercury – a hundred atmospheres and a perfect vacuum – machines working in a circle without fire or steam, generating power at one end of the process and giving it out at the other – carriages that conveyed, every one to its own Railway – wheels within wheels, to multiply speed without diminishing power – with every complication of balancing and countervailing forces, to the ne plus ultra of perpetual motion. Every scheme which the restless ingenuity or prolific imagination of man could devise was liberally offered to the Company: the difficulty was to choose and to decide.

  George and Robert Stephenson’s entry was called Rocket. They started work on it immediately the prize was announced. A long correspondence took place between George in Liverpool and Robert in Newcastle as they battled through each stage in its development, with Robert sounding depressed each time he reached a snag in construction and George cheerfully passing on new suggestions to get round each problem. The most important development in the Rocket was the multi-tube boiler. One of the problems with all locomotive engines had been to increase the heating surface of the boiler and therefore the power of the engine. Rocket had twenty-five copper tubes, each three inches in diameter, which extended from one end of the boiler to the other. The idea had, apparently, been thought of earlier but no one had ever successfully done it. This was the basis of all locomotive boilers for well over the next hundred years, in fact until the end of the steam engine era. Henry Booth, the company’s remarkable treasurer, is credited with having thought of the idea with Robert being responsible for its execution, helped by George’s advice.

  Another important element in the Rocket’s construction was the use of the blast-pipe – leading the exhaust steam from the cylinders back into the chimney. This greatly increased the draught in the chimney and kept up the pressure. There has also been great argument about who first perfected this idea. Some experts say that both Trevithick and Timothy Hackworth had already tried it and that George only got to it by accident, having turned the exhaust steam into the chimney as a way of stopping it escaping, discovering by chance that it increased the pressure. In a handwritten letter to the draughtsman at Forth Street in August, George described the process. ‘I may mention to you that I have put on to the coke engine a longer exarsting pipe, riching nearly to the top of the chimeney but find it dose not do so well as putting it into the chimeney lower down.’

  While Robert worked on the Rocket, George was completing the great tunnel into Liverpool. During the summer of 1829 it opened on certain days and became a great attraction for the people of Liverpool. George had the roof whitewashed and gas lamps hung at twenty-five-yard intervals, and for one shilling the public could inspect its entire length. On 21 August, William Huskisson was one of several important visitors, watched by a crowd of three thousand, who visited the tunnel. He praised Stephenson’s work, envying him for ‘the honour of th
e direction and completion of such an undertaking’. He recommended that the public should also go and visit the great work being done across Chat Moss, at the Manchester end of the line.

  George was very pleased with the compliments and described the visit in a letter to Longridge in Newcastle.

  Many of the first families in the County were waiting to witness the procession which accompanied by a band of Music occupying one of the waggons descended in grand style through the Tunnel. The whole went off most pleasantly without the slightest accident attending our various movements. Mr Huskisson and the Directors dined with Mr Lawrence [the Chairman] in the evening. The Engineer was one of the party and a most splendid set out there was I assure you. The evening was spent in a very pleasing manner.

  The Rocket was ready on 12 September, when it was taken to pieces at the Newcastle works and put in carts and sent by road to Carlisle. It went from there by barge down the canal to Bowness and thence by sea to Liverpool.

  Ten locomotive engines had at one time been intending to take part in the Rainhill trials but on the official opening day, 8 October, only five were ready. It was organised like a race meeting, with the five iron horses in their own colours, each limbering up to the delight of the large crowd in the grandstand and the enclosures. They each had to go up and down the course twenty times, a distance in all of sixty miles. There was, amongst many other conditions, a weight limit of six tons. A race card gave the details of each engine.

  No 1. Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson of London, ‘The Novelty’. Copper and Blue, Weight: 2 tons 15 cwt.

  No 2. Mr. Hackworth of Darlington, ‘The Sans Pareil’. Green, Yellow and Black, Weight: 4 tons 8 cwt 2 qr.

  No 3. Mr. Robert Stephenson of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘The Rocket’. Yellow and Black, White Chimney, Weight: 4 tons 3 cwt.

  No 4. Mr. Brandreth of Liverpool, ‘The Cyclopede’. Weight: 3 tons, worked by a horse.

  No 5. Mr. Burstall of Edinburgh, ‘The Perseverance’. Red Wheels, Weight: 2 tons 17 cwt.

  Timothy Burstall’s Perseverance was not powerful enough to be taken seriously and was damaged in transit from Edinburgh. It never managed to do a proper trial run and was soon withdrawn. Cyclopede was a joke entrant, a piece of eccentric entertainment rather than a serious contestant, made by Thomas Shaw Brandreth, one of the Liverpool company’s leading shareholders and a friend of George’s. The motive power was a horse, which certainly wasn’t new, but its method was ingenious. It walked up and down a moving platform, like a treadmill, and so turned the wheels of the machine.

  Timothy Hackworth’s Sans Pareil was a good engine, but everything went wrong. Firstly he’d had to farm out many of its pieces, not having enough facilities at his engine sheds at Shildon, on the Darlington Line. The boiler was made for him by Longridge at Bedlington and the cylinders by Robert Stephenson at Forth Street. (His supporters said, quite wrongly, that he had been deliberately supplied with inferior parts.) Hackworth experienced endless breakdowns and in any case his engine had not complied with all the conditions.

  The real threat to the Rocket came from Novelty, the London entrant, built by Braithwaite and Ericsson (a Swedish inventor) and named after a theatre. One of its supporters was Vignoles, the engineer George had quarrelled with. They’d built it in seven weeks and had been unable to try it out beforehand as there were no railways in the London area. It was considered by far the most beautiful of the entrants, the lightest and fastest looking, and the large crowd took to it immediately.

  The crowd included many engineering experts, critics as well as enthusiasts for the cause of locomotion, from Britain and abroad. Americans in particular had been sending regular deputations to look at the Liverpool line for some time. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company had sent its first party of engineers in 1828 and they had representatives at the Rainhill trials. They planned to publish a full report, which they did, using it as a means of whipping up support for their own railway. Horatio Allen, on behalf of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, a gentleman who was to become one of the greatest engineers in the history of the American railways, was present in person at the trials.

  For George this was the climax of fifteen years’ work on locomotives, the final test of all those engines he’d developed since Blucher in 1814. He was not being tested verbally, as in parliament, on his education or his knowledge as an engineer, but where it really mattered – in producing results. This was to be a straight competition and there was nothing he liked better than a contest to show his so-called betters that he was right and they were wrong. If he turned out to be wrong, well, people might, perhaps, let him build more railway lines but who would want his locomotives? Or anybody’s locomotives, come to that.

  For the vast majority of the crowd it was simply a gala day, a cross between Le Mans and Ascot. Comparisons with a horse race meeting were used by most observers in the newspapers. The directors encouraged the festive atmosphere, seeing it as a public relations exercise for their exciting new railway as well as a way of publicly and finally testing the value of locomotives. The reporter on the Liverpool Courier describing the opening day, 6 October, was highly delighted by what he saw.

  Wednesday, Oct. 7 1829

  The Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Rail-Road having offered, in the month of April last, a prize of £250 for the best Locomotive Engine, the trial of the carriages which had been constructed to contend for the prize commenced yesterday. The running ground was on the Manchester side of the Rainhill Bridge, at a place called Kenrick’s Cross, about ten miles from Liverpool. At this place the Rail-Road runs on a dead level, and formed, of course, a fine spot for trying the comparative speed of the carriages. The directors had made suitable preparations for this important as well as interesting experiment of the powers of Locomotive Carriages. For the accommodation of the ladies who might visit the course (to use the language of the turf), a booth was erected on the south side of the Rail-Road, equi-distant from the extremities of the trial ground. Here a band of music was stationed, and amused the company during the day by playing pleasing and favourite airs. The directors, each of whom wore a white ribbon in his buttonhole, arrived on the course shortly after ten o’clock in the forenoon, having come from Huyton in cars drawn by Mr. Stephenson’s Locomotive Steam Carriage, which moved up the inclined plane from thence with considerable velocity. Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, in great numbers, arrived from Liverpool and Warrington, St. Helen’s and Manchester, as well as from the surrounding country, in vehicles of every description. Indeed all the roads presented, on this occasion, scenes similar to those which roads leading to race-courses usually present during the day of sport. The pedestrians were extremely numerous, and crowded all the roads which conducted to the raceground. The spectators lined both sides of the road, for the distance of a mile and a half; and, although the men employed on the line, amounting to nearly 200, acted as special constables, with orders to keep the crowd off the course, all their efforts to carry their orders into effect were rendered nugatory, by the people persisting in walking on the ground. It is difficult to form an estimate of the number of individuals who had congregated to behold the experiment; but there could not, at a moderate calculation, be less than 10,000. Some gentlemen even went so far as to compute them at 15,000.

  Never, perhaps, on any previous occasion, were so many scientific gentlemen and practical engineers collected together on one spot as there were on the Rail-Road yesterday. The interesting and important nature of the experiments to be tried had drawn them from all parts of the kingdom, to be present at this contest of Locomotive Carriages, as well as to witness an exhibition whose results may alter the whole system of our existing internal communications, many and important as they are, substituting an agency whose ultimate effects can scarcely be anticipated; for although the extraordinary change in our river and coast navigation, by steam-boats, may afford some rule of comparison, still the effect of wind and waves, and a resisting medium, combine in vessels to
present obstructions to the full exercise of the gigantic power which will act on a Railway unaffected by the seasons, and unlimited but by the demand for its application.

  There were only one or two public-houses in the vicinity of the trial-ground. These were, of course, crowded with company as the day advanced, particularly the Rail-Road Tavern, which was literally crammed with company. The landlady had very prudently and providently reserved one room for the accommodation of the better class visitors. The good lady will, we imagine, have substantial reasons for remembering the trial of Locomotive Carriages. But there is nothing like making hay while the sun shines.

  When the trials began, the tough no-nonsense journalists from the technical press came into their own, ignoring any human interest or flowery descriptions of the crowds but getting straight down to the hard facts – or what they saw as hard facts. Though one hesitates to accuse any journalist of biased reporting, it would seem that the worthy reporter from Mechanics’ Magazine was determined from the beginning that Novelty was going to win.

  The engine which made the first trial, was the ‘Rocket’ of Mr. Robert Stephenson (the son, we believe, of Mr. George Stephenson, the engineer of the railway). It is a large and strongly-built engine, and went with a velocity, which, as long as the spectators had nothing to contrast it with, they thought surprising enough. It drew a weight of twelve tons, nine cwt, at the rate of ten miles four chains in an hour, (just exceeding the stipulated maximum,) and when the weight was detached from it, went at a speed of about eighteen miles an hour. The faults most perceptible in this engine, were a great inequality in its velocity, and a very partial fulfilment of the condition that it should ‘effectually consume its own smoke’.

  The next engine that exhibited its powers was ‘The Novelty’ of Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson, The great lightness of this engine, (it is about one half lighter than Mr. Stephenson’s,) its compactness, and its beautiful workmanship, excited universal admiration; a sentiment speedily changed into perfect wonder, by its truly marvellous performances. It was resolved to try first its speed merely; that is at what rate it would go, carrying only its complement of coke and water, with Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson to manage it. Almost at once, it darted off at the amazing velocity of twenty-eight miles an hour, and it actually did one mile in the incredibly short space of one minute and 53 seconds! Neither did we observe any appreciable falling off in the rate of speed; it was uniform, steady, and continuous. Had the railway been completed, the engine would, at this rate, have gone nearly the whole way from Liverpool to Manchester within the hour; and Mr. Braithwaite has, indeed, publicly offered to stake a thousand pounds, that as soon as the road is opened, he will perform the entire distance in that time.