George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive engine, and the founder of the railway system of traveling, was born in 1781 in England. His parents were poor, honest, industrious people. His birthplace a cottage with a clay floor, bare rafters, and unplastered walls.
George was the second of six children, and his father’s earnings seldom exceeded twelve shillings a week. Little, therefore, was left for clothing, and nothing at all for school. As a child, George’s time was spent in running errands and playing about the cottage.
He often helped to care for the children, his special duty being to see that they were kept out of the way of the coal wagons that passed on the tramroad in front of the cottage. These wagons were drawn on wooden rails by horses. Who can tell to what extent the constant sight of this rude railway may have shaped the great work of George Stephenson’s later life? It is interesting to know that the first experiment of a locomotive steam engine was tried on this very tramroad.
When George was eight years old, he found his first employment. He was appointed to look after the cows belonging to a widow, and for this he received twopence (2.5 cents) a day. He had plenty of leisure, which he spent chiefly in company with a favorite playmate, erecting small mills in the little streams around, and making engines out of clay, with hemlock stalks for steam pipes.
George was soon promoted to hoe turnips and to lead horses in plowing, though he was barely big enough to stride across the furrows. For this work he received fourpence a day.
But his great desire was to be with his father and brother at the coal mine. His wish was granted, and his wages were raised, to sixpence and afterward to eightpence a day. This was his employment for several years.
The growing and thoughtful lad, however, never forgot his clay engines; and his great ambition was to have the management of a real engine. Great, therefore, was his delight when he was taken to be an assistant to his father in firing an engine.
At seventeen years of age, his youthful ambition was gratified by his appointment as engineer at the same coal mine where his father was employed as fireman. Here, at last, he was able to carefully study every part of the machinery and to become a thorough master of the construction of the steam engine, an opportunity he had so ardently longed for.
He was now eighteen years of age, but he had never learned to read. His parents could not afford to send him to school, but they had tried to train him to good habits at home. He had been taught to use every minute wisely, and now he determined to learn to read and write. At the age of nineteen, he was proud to be able to write his own name. Then he began the study of arithmetic, working out his problems upon a slate as he sat by his engine fire.
Industry, sobriety, and thrift were the true secret of George’s success as a young man, and these sterling qualities afterward made him useful, prosperous, and honored. Besides his work as engineer, he became an expert in mending and making shoes. He also became skillful in mending clocks.
A heavy trial awaited him in the early death of his wife, leaving one son, Robert. The next year after this sad event, his father was blinded by an accident and reduced to want. With part of the money he had so carefully saved, George at once paid his father’s debts and placed him and his mother in a comfortable cottage near his own home, where he supported them until their deaths.
A great triumph now awaited him, a fitting reward of his own close attention and perseverance. An engine of defective construction had been erected for the purpose of pumping the water from a neighboring pit. It proved utterly incapable of doing the work for which it had been erected. All the best engineers in the district had tried in vain to remedy its defects. George examined it and expressed his belief that he could make it efficient. He was asked to undertake the task, and very soon the pit was cleared of water.
It would be a pleasant task to follow the growing success of this noble young man step by step—to read of his resolve to give his son the best education he could, of his own unceasing efforts at self-improvement, of his ingenuity, his untiring industry, and his masculine vigor.
Amid difficulties of no ordinary kind, God was gradually preparing George Stephenson for his great and enduring work—the construction of the locomotive engine, and the introduction of the vast railway system—so that in this “time of the end” when “knowledge shall be increased” His truth might be carried to “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.” In the year 1825, this work was accomplished, and passengers and goods were first carried over a railway by a locomotive. This great achievement ranked among the highest of all the wonderful products of the industrial era.
Ferns, Selections from the True Education Series, ©1976, 60–63