George Stephenson (24 page)

One of the most serious rumours in circulation about the time of Robert's return was that locomotives were to be withdrawn as too expensive. Financially the Darlington line was certainly not proving a gold mine, confirming what Edward Pease had always said. At the end of their second year in operation the annual revenue was just £18,304, only £2,000 more than Pease had estimated. Until 1830, when the revenue was still only £23,727, they were paying dividends of 5 per cent. (It was only after 1830 that traffic and profits started booming, especially when the iron trade began.)

Locomotives, from every point of view, still had to prove themselves, as Robert soon realised on his journeys round the country. From 1 January 1828, which was when he wrote the following letter to Longridge, he decided to make them his first priority.

Liverpool, Jan 1, 1828

My Dear Sir,

I had hoped my father would accompany me to the North this time, but he finds that all his attention must be devoted to this road alone.

I have just returned from a ride along the line for seven miles, in which distance I have not been a little surprised to find excavations of such magnitude. Since I came down from London, I have been talking a great deal to my father about endeavouring to reduce the size and ugliness of our travelling-engines, by applying the engine either on the side of the boiler or beneath it entirely, somewhat similarly to Gurney's steam-coach. He has agreed to an alteration which I think will considerably reduce the quantity of machinery as well as the liability to mismanagement. Mr. Jos. Pease writes my father that in their present complicated state they cannot be managed by ‘fools,' therefore they must undergo some alteration or amendment. It is very true that the locomotive engine, or any other kind of engine, may be shaken to pieces; but such accidents are in a great measure under the control of enginemen, which are, by the by, not the most manageable class of beings. They perhaps want improvement as much as the engines.

While Robert moved back up to Newcastle, George remained in Liverpool, struggling to complete the construction of the line, but he was in regular correspondence with Robert about the progress of new engines, passing on information about likely customers for the locomotive works.

Liverpool, March 3, 1828

Dear Robert,

I wish you could contrive to come here to stay a week or a fortnight.… There is an American Engineer here and I think he will also want four Loco motive engines. There is also a neighbour of mine who will want a Steam Mill Engine, and I think it will be better for you to be here to close the bargains yourself in case we can agree for prices – I expect now in a few weeks to receive orders to proceed with the Canterbury Engines. The Bill is now in Parliament and is expected to pass shortly, to enable Mr. Ellis to take the lease of that concern and I suppose as soon as it goes forward I must deliver my profits up to Robert Stephenson & Co. I think it is likely the Chester Line will go forward which I was speaking to Mr. Longridge about – I only returned last night from examining the ground – I send in my report tomorrow of the practicability and expense of the Line – I am glad to hear you have got a Horse to suit you, but if it is a cheap one I think it is very likely to be a shabby one and very unfit to come by the side of mine; the whole of which are as fat as pigs –

I am

Dear Robert

Your Afft. Father

GEO. STEPHENSON

Despite George's promises to the Liverpool board, it is obvious from this letter that he was still involved in other lines, though when it came to an official engagement, he usually passed over the job of engineer to other people – usually to someone in his own family or to his assistants. Robert, the most talented of his three brothers, had been telling the truth when he wrote to James that time about a job, extolling his own virtues. He'd laid down the rails for George at Hetton and was now appointed to construct the Bolton and Leigh Railway, one of the lines George had helped to survey. Young Robert had got the job of engineer to the Canterbury and Whitstable line, which was useful to him when he was courting Fanny, giving him a good excuse, as well as paying his expenses, to go down to London.

It's hard to decide whether George was power mad, greedy or simply a genius, managing to be involved in so many jobs. His critics certainly accused him of the first two, and he'd already made many enemies, but from his point of view, believing implicitly in the future of locomotion, he felt he had to take on everything offered because he alone knew what had to be done. The more railways he built, the more locomotives would be needed. But his mono-mania led to many rows with the board and on several occasions almost led to his downfall.

In 1828, work on the Liverpool line was proving so difficult and so expensive, in construction and in keeping the opposition quiet, that the board ran out of money and was forced to apply to the government for an exchequer loan of £100,000. One of the government's conditions was that an outside expert should be sent to find out what on earth was going on at Liverpool and advise if a loan of £100,000 was really justified. Their expert turned out to be none other than Thomas Telford, the greatest engineer of the day, famed throughout Europe for his roads, bridges and canals. He was by now seventy-two, but still the most distinguished man in his profession. He had been the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a body of gentlemen whom George, with some justification, thought were against him. He was in the middle of the construction of the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal (a project begun in 1827, the same year as the Liverpool earthworks, and not finished till 1835) and sent an assistant at first to check up on George. George refused to see him, being always out or unavailable. Telford finally came in person and toured the line with George, not at all happy with what he saw. He was highly critical of George's method of fixing prices (paying different contractors different prices for the same job, depending on how George felt about them) and of George's insistence on supervising and deciding everything himself. He felt that a sum nearer £200,000 would be needed to finish the job, if it was ever finished.

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.'