Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century Part 4

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. How did England join with the rest of Europe in undoing the work of Napoleon?

2. Give the chief events in the early life of Canning.

3. Why did Canning authorize an attack on Denmark?

4. What was his relation to the Peninsular War?

5. What was his "lost opportunity" of 1812?

6. How did he set forth his plans when he became foreign secretary in 1821?

7. What interference in the affairs of Europe did the Holy Alliance attempt?

8. How did Canning defend his recognition of Spanish-American independence?

9. What part did England play in the liberation of Greece?

10. What were the personal qualities of Canning?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GEORGE CANNING. Frank H. Hill.

POETRY OF THE ANTI-JACOBIN. Edited by Charles Edmonds.

IV

STEPHENSON AND THE RAILWAY

[GEORGE STEPHENSON, born, Wylam, near Newcastle, June 9, 1781; died, August 12, 1848; driver lad in a colliery; at fourteen, a.s.sistant to his father as fireman of colliery engines; at seventeen, engineman; at eighteen, learned to read in night school; 1812, enginewright at Killingworth colliery; 1814, operated his locomotive, "My Lord"; 1822, engineer of Stockton and Darlington Railroad (opened 1825); engineer of Liverpool and Manchester Railroad (opened 1830); produced locomotive "Rocket,"

capable of thirty miles an hour.]

In a bare room of a laborer's tenement in the colliery village of Wylam, in Northumberland, on the 9th day of June, 1781, was born a babe to whose mind and hand England was to owe as much in future years as to any high-born minister of the crown. Indeed, one might trust the world to give a verdict in favor of George Stephenson, the founder of the steam railway as against his sovereign, King George III. himself.

The father, the "old Rob" of the village boys, was the fireman of the pumping engine at the colliery hard by. His father before him--the Stephensons were no pedigree-hunters, and traced their line no farther- -was a Scotchman who, so far as anything was remembered of him, had come into the north of England as a gentleman's servant. Robert was a favorite with the village children, to whom he gave the freedom of the fire-room, and was a boon companion of his own houseful of boys and girls, kindling their fancy by his headful of tales, and sharpening their observation of the beauties of nature by making them the companions of his walks a-field, where the birds and other living things were the objects of his peculiar interest and love.

As soon as little George was old enough to "take notice" he must have discovered the railway which ran before his father's door, and his earliest responsibilities were connected with the oversight of his younger brothers and sisters lest in their play they should fall under the wheels of the cars or the hoofs of the horses that supplied the motive power. The road was a wooden tramway along which coal cars were dragged from the mines to tidewater.

The first tramways in the northern coal-fields were made by laying a track of planking on wooden sleepers. This device was more than a century old when George Stephenson was born. In some places this had been improved by plating the planks with iron.

While the Wylam lad was still a barefoot boy, cast-iron rails were being introduced in Leicestershire, a wheel having been designed with a f.l.a.n.g.e to keep it on the narrow track. Thus the railway was brought to a stage which needed only the application of steam to its motive power to carry it into a new and vastly enlarged phase.

The fireman's son was set to win his share of the family bread before he was ten. He tended a widow's cows, led the plow- horses, and hoed turnips before he entered a colliery as a breaker-boy, where his task was to pick out stones and other foreign substances from the fuel. Sixpence a day was the wage.

Soon at twopence more he was promoted to drive the gin-horse that, circling around a capstan, hoisted the buckets of water and coals out of the pit. At fourteen he became his father's a.s.sistant in the fire-room at Dewley Burn at a shilling a day. At fifteen he obtained a foreman's position in another colliery. At seventeen he had gone over his father's head, and had charge of a pumping engine at Water-row Pit. When his wages reached twelve shillings a week he thought he was "a made man for life," but his ign.o.ble content was soon disturbed. Always fascinated by machinery, as he was by birds and animals, he made a pet of his engines, studying them with a singular fondness, and making himself master of their principles and their parts. This knowledge prompted him to learn more, especially to find out something about the improved engines of Boulton & Watt, of which rumors had reached the enginemen of the north. To do this he must learn to read, an art which he seems to have considered superfluous until he was eighteen. Never did student work harder than Geordie Stephenson at his new task, amazing his teachers and his mates by his progress at "the three R's." He was now brakesman of a hoisting engine, dividing his small leisure between his studies and his cobblery, for he added to his earnings by mending shoes. His income was now some ninety pounds a year. He saved his first guinea and felt himself a rich man.

At twenty-one he married a farmer's house-servant and went to housekeeping in a cottage at Wellington Quay.

It would be a long story, however interesting, to follow the young mechanic through the experiences by which he won a name in all the North Country as the cleverest of "engine doctors,"

eking out his wages by making lasts, mending watches, and even cutting out coats and trousers for the wives of the pitmen to sew up for their husbands. His desire to provide his motherless boy Robert with better schooling than he had enjoyed sharpened his wits and added strength to his arm. Fortunately the son proved to be not only an apt scholar, but had the rare gift of being able to teach others. Whatever he learned in the good schools to which his father sent him, he imparted to his father.

So boy and man progressed together in their educational partnership.

When George Stephenson became chief enginewright of the Killingworth collieries at one hundred pounds a year he thought he had reached the summit of his ambition. The duties of the position made less demand upon him for manual labor, and left him time to carry out some of his mechanical ideas. He devised new hoists and pumps for the mines, and then applied himself to the ever-present problem of cheapening the transportation of the coals between pit mouth and ship side. One of his first improvements of this sort was a gravity railway, so arranged that the loaded cars, running down to the river by their own weight, furnished the power to draw the empty cars to the summit again by cable. When George Stephenson took up the problem of perfecting a "traveling steam engine" he had the advantage of knowing what had been accomplished by other experimenters. For fifty years inventors had been turning out steam engines of considerable promise in the model stage, but of little practical performance. Indeed, about 1803, a Cornishman named Trevithick had produced a locomotive which was used for a time to transport metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could walk. The next year a Derbyshire mechanic produced a "Mechanical Traveler," the legs of which were moved alternately by steam, but the bursting of its boiler on its trial trip put an end to its picturesque career of doubtful usefulness.

One Mr. Blackett, an enterprising collier of Wylam, introduced the ideas of Trevithick and Blenkinsop to the Tyneside and so brought them under the observant eye of the Killingworth enginewright, who had such a clever way of smoothing away difficulties in complicated machinery. After repeated and costly experiments, Mr. Blackett evolved a type of locomotive which, though noisy and clumsy, did better work than any of its predecessors.

After making a careful study of what had been done by others, George Stephenson came to the conclusion that he could improve upon the existing locomotive models. This was about 1813, when he was about thirty-four years old. He said to his friends that "there was no limit to the speed of such an engine, if the works could be made to stand." One of his employers, Lord Ravensworth, advanced the necessary money for constructing his first "Traveling Engine" at West Moor, the colliery blacksmith undertaking to carry out his designs. Dr. Smiles's description of this locomotive may be reproduced: "The boiler was cylindrical of wrought iron, eight feet in length and thirty-four inches in diameter, with an internal flue tube twenty inches wide pa.s.sing through it. The engine had two vertical cylinders of eight inches diameter and two feet stroke let into the boiler, working the propelling gear with cross heads and connecting rods. The power of the two cylinders was combined by means of spur-wheels which communicated the motive power to the wheels supporting the engine on the rail. . . The engine thus worked upon what is termed the second motion. The chimney was of wrought iron, round which was a chamber extending back to the feed pumps, for the purpose of heating the water previous to the injection into the boiler. The engine had no springs, and was mounted on a wooden frame supported on four wheels." The engine made its trial trip July 25, 1814, on which occasion it showed a speed of four miles an hour in drawing a load of thirty tons. This engine was named "Blucher," after the distinguished Prussian field-marshal.

Blucher was almost immediately improved by its inventor. First he doubled the steam-making power of its boiler by turning the exhaust from the cylinders into the smoke-stack, thus creating a forced draught. Second he built another engine, in which the tooth-wheel driving gear gave way to a simple and direct connection between the piston and the driving wheels which rolled upon the rails. This type of locomotive, developing some six miles an hour, did its work so well in the colliery that it was retained, with very slight alterations, for more than half a century. The report of its success got abroad slowly, and Mr.

Stephenson was commissioned to build a railway and a number of locomotives for a colliery in another shire. The success of this piece of engineering encouraged him in sending his son Robert, a youth of fine promise, to Edinburgh to study physical sciences in the university, where in his brief residence he took a mathematical prize.

The year 1823 marked another forward step for George Stephenson and railroads. Two years before a road had been chartered to connect the Durham coal-fields with tidewater. Stephenson heard of the project, and at once proposed to the company to make an iron railroad of the new wooden tramway and equip it with his traveling engines. His arguments and demonstrations won over the skeptical directors. They had their charter amended so as to authorize the use of steam as motive power for the transport of pa.s.sengers as well as merchandise. Thus began the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first in the world with a pa.s.senger charter. The chief engineer was George Stephenson, on a salary of five hundred pounds. At the same time, with the a.s.sistance of the railroad people, he founded the locomotive shops at Newcastle.

The new railroad, the first public line, was opened in September, 1825. As its construction progressed, its engineer had become increasingly sanguine of success. He said to his son Robert at this time: "I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country--when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the great highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a workingman to travel upon a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost unsurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but what I have said will come to pa.s.s as sure as you live. I only wish I may live to see the day, though that I can scarcely hope for, as I know how slow all human progress is, and with what difficulty I have been able to get the locomotive thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than ten years'

successful experiment at Killingworth."

The first train over the road was such an one as had never been seen before. George Stephenson was at the lever when the engine pulled out with a string of eight cars behind it. One regular pa.s.senger coach--the first ever built--held the directors, and twenty-one improvised pa.s.senger "wagons" carried some six hundred daring individuals. Coal and flour filled the other cars. The journey was safely accomplished at a speed which is said at times to have reached the hitherto unheard of rate of twelve miles an hour. The road, with its three Stephenson locomotives and many horses, was successful from the first, and its dividends were among the chief inducements which led to the next and more important advance in railroad construction, the Liverpool and Manchester line.

Manchester was the great manufacturing center of the industrial England, which the inventions of Arkwright and Watt had called into existence. Its port was Liverpool. The natural means of communication between the two cities was quite inadequate to the changed conditions. In 1821 surveys were made for a tramway, and before the Stockton road was completed Stephenson had been selected as chief engineer of the new and more ambitious enterprise. Yet his a.s.sertion that trains could be moved between the two cities at twenty miles an hour raised serious doubts in many minds as to his sanity. A writer in the "Quarterly Review"

thought that even though a few foolhardy persons might trust themselves to a vehicle moving at such speed--twice that of the swiftest stagecoaches--Parliament for the general welfare should limit the speed of all railways to eight or nine miles an hour, as the greatest that could be ventured on with safety.

It was while the grant of a charter to this Liverpool and Manchester Railway was being discussed in a committee of the House of Commons that the shrewd North Country engineer first faced the trained Parliamentary lawyers. He had been cautioned to keep his figures for speed within the most moderate limits so as not to prejudice the company's case, but his belief in his own invention mastered his restraint, though as he afterward said, he did his best "to keep the engine down to ten miles an hour." In fact, his daring prediction of twelve miles per hour struck the learned counsel with horror. They objected that horses would fly in terror from such a monster. He replied that horses had been known to shy at wheelbarrows. They tried to make him admit that the wheels would slip on the smooth rails, but he knew that they would bite without teeth. One of the committee said, "Suppose that a cow were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the engine; would not that be a very awkward circ.u.mstance?" To which the countryman had a ready reply, "Very awkward--for the cow!"

The opposition, which was largely animated by the existing ca.n.a.l interest, ventured some views which the experience of the next five years was to make most ridiculous. They declared that the plan to carry the rails over the surveyed route across Chat Moss, a wide mora.s.s, was impossible; and furthermore, that no locomotive could make headway against the high winds which at times prevailed in that region. Experts were brought to testify that "no engineer in his senses would go through Chat Moss if he wanted to make a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester." "In my judgment," said one of them, "a railroad cannot be made over Chat Moss without going to the bottom." The committee decided against the bill, but at the next session Parliament granted the company the power to construct the road, the question whether or not locomotives should be used upon it being left in abeyance. George Stephenson was chosen to be chief engineer, at one thousand pounds a year.

Chat Moss was conquered by an ingenious device which practically floated the road-bed upon its spongy surface. Tunnels were driven through the hills, deep cuttings were made wherever needed, a ravine was crossed by a viaduct of brick and stone, and more than threescore bridges were thrown across the streams. All the plans for this complicated work pa.s.sed under the eye, and many of them took their first form in the mind of the chief, whose skill as a mechanic was for the time sunk in his genius for civil engineering. By dint of the most strenuous application, and by the dominance of a spirit of perseverance which no discouragement or obstacle could daunt, Stephenson brought the road to triumphant completion. The next thing was to convince the directors that the steam locomotive was the proper equipment for a public railway. As a beginning, he persuaded the company to place one of his engines upon its construction trains. The experts who were employed to investigate the many proposed applications of power decided, however, that the most feasible equipment was a series of twenty-one stationary engines located at intervals along the right of way and hauling the cars stage after stage by means of a rope wound upon a drum-the principle of the cable railway which afterwards had its day in our streets.

Still Stephenson would give the directors no peace. Finally, in order to settle the question of the practical utility of the traveling engine, the company offered a prize of five hundred pounds for the best locomotive engine, to be awarded after a compet.i.tive test upon certain conditions, the most notable of which were:

"2. The engine of six tons weight must be able to draw after it, day by day, twenty tons weight at ten miles an hour with a pressure of steam on the boiler not exceeding fifty pounds to the square inch."

"4. The engine and boiler must be supported on springs and rest on six wheels, the height of the whole not exceeding fifteen feet to the top of the chimney."

"7. The engine must be delivered complete and ready for trial at the Liverpool end of the railway not later than the 1st of October, 1829."

"8. The price of the engine must not exceed five hundred and fifty pounds."

George Stephenson and his son Robert threw all their resources into the production of the locomotive which was to carry their colors in the contest. The "Rocket" engine, which was built in their Newcastle shop, was fitted with a tubular boiler six feet long and three feet four inches in diameter. The fire-box was two feet wide and three feet high. On each side of the boiler at its rear end was an oblique cylinder, the piston-rods being connected with the outside of the two driving wheels, which were in front.

The two rear wheels were about one-half the diameter of the drivers. The tender, also fourwheeled, was a simple affair, the water being carried in a large cask.

After a successful trial trip, the "Rocket," which weighed but four and a half tons, was sent by wagon across England to Carlisle, and thence to Liverpool. It was one of four steam engines entered in the compet.i.tion which attracted wide attention. Among the entries was the "Novelty," the production of that talented Swede, John Ericsson, who afterwards, in America, built the iron-clad "Monitor." The "Novelty" showed fine bursts of speed, but failed in point of endurance. The "Perseverance"

and "Sanspareil" developed radical defects, but the "Rocket,"

driven by George Stephenson's own hand was prepared for every turn of the compet.i.tion, and surpa.s.sed all in power, speed, and general serviceability. To its makers the prize was unhesitatingly awarded, whereupon the hardy engineer amazed every beholder by letting out the last link and dashing past the grandstand at the rate of more than thirty miles an hour. The forced draft, which had made the Killingworth freight engines so successful, coupled with the tubular boiler, formed a combination which won the battle for the locomotive once for all, and made the name of George Stephenson a household word.

A year later, on the 15th of September, 1830, the Manchester and Liverpool Railway was formally opened. The Duke of Wellington-- the first citizen of the realm--was present with Sir Robert Peel and other distinguished personages, together with a vast throng of sightseers, enthusiastic spectators of the consummation of George Stephenson's dreams. Though marred by a fatal accident, the occasion proved the entire practicability of the railway as a means of transportation. The mult.i.tudes who rode in its cars on that memorable day were but a foretaste of the patronage which the line was to receive. Although the intention of its projectors was to limit its traffic chiefly to freight, the road from the first found its offices besieged by persons eager to ride. Thus pa.s.senger traffic became established as its leading source of revenue, and thus were the capitalists encouraged to prosecute the extension of the railway system to points where the outlook for freight business was much less than between Liverpool and Manchester. Though these roads were fiercely opposed by the landowners, the ca.n.a.l-men, and turnpike proprietors, they were pressed forward in every direction. Robert Stephenson shared with his father the responsibility of engineering some of the princ.i.p.al lines, though the two men had the grim satisfaction of seeing the experts who had ridiculed the initial project now eagerly bidding for the opportunity of conducting surveys for the new lines.

A mania for building railroads seized the world. The Stephensons were in demand not only throughout Great Britain, but even on the Continent. They had already made a market for their engines abroad, when, in 1835, they were summoned by the King of Belgium to a.s.sist in laying out a system of railways for that kingdom.

For his services here the engineer was knighted by the King and banqueted at the royal table. Honored at home and abroad; happy in the general adoption of the ideas to which he had clung through opposition and adversity; proud of the son Robert, for whose education he had worked like a slave, and whom he now saw hailed as one of the great engineers of the world; fortunate in business; respected and beloved by men of every cla.s.s, George Stephenson spent the closing years of his life in affluence and ease. He had earned his peace, for he had fought and won the battle of the locomotive, and so, by improving the means of communication, had advanced the interests of trade, and promoted the welfare of England and of mankind. George Stephenson died in 1848. His son Robert outlived him but eleven years, and was buried in Westminster Abbey as one of the great men of the century. The boldness of his engineering projects, the skill and daring with which he flung his railway bridges and viaducts across rivers, valleys, and straits, had caught and held the imagination of the world. Together the two men wrote the name of Stephenson large and lasting in the record of nineteenth-century England.

Had the nineteenth century nothing else to show save the improvement in transportation, its fame would be secure. Within a dozen years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Great Britain was covered with railways or railway surveys, establishing all the trunk-lines which now exist. The thirty and a half miles of the original line grew by leaps and bounds to a system of nearly two thousand miles, the property of a single company, whose property is valued at five hundred million dollars. Twenty-five years after the day of the "Rocket's" victory eight thousand miles of railway were in operation in the United Kingdom. Another twenty-five years brought the total up to eighteen thousand miles, which had cost for construction nearly four billion dollars. At the same time (1883) the number of locomotives was 14,469, of cars, 490,661.

Before Manchester and Liverpool were connected by railway thirty stage-coaches sufficed for the pa.s.senger traffic. The railway carried seven hundred thousand pa.s.sengers between the two cities in its first year and one-half. Fifty years later the pa.s.sengers on all the English lines numbered six hundred million, of whom eighty-five per cent traveled third-cla.s.s. The freight traffic in the same year was two hundred and twenty-six million tons. Robert Stephenson lived to see one per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom employed on the railways. In 1884 the number of such employees was 367,793. These few figures are sufficient to suggest the magnitude of the economic changes which took place in England, and indeed throughout the civilized world, as the direct result of the talent, industry, and perseverance of George Stephenson, the Northumbrian plowboy.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW