The Boyhood of Great Inventors

by A. Fraser Robertson

Then Stephenson showed the same patience—for the world was long of being convinced—as he had done on those long night-shifts, sitting lonely by the engine fire and working out his sums, or as years later, when prospects were very dark and money scarce, he wept bitter tears, “for he knew not where his lot in life would be cast.”

But though only a self-taught mechanic, Stephenson stuck to his guns in the face of the most skilled engineers in the land. For two long months the thing hung in the balance. It came before the great House of Commons. George himself was put into the witness-box. Single-handed, undaunted, he faced a world that was all against him. And then he had to bear the great trial of his life. The Bill was thrown out of Parliament. But still he did not despair. He looked into the future, and he saw himself conqueror. The Bill was again brought forward and eventually passed. I could tell you then of his long course of triumphs. How his engine, “The Rocket,” won a £500 prize. How really the first seed of the Railway System of the world was sown then. How then he got leave to make a railway between Stockton and Darlington, and in time one between Manchester and Liverpool. How when, in 1830, the line was finished, people flocked in hundreds and thousands to see “a steam coach running upon a railway at three times the speed of a mail-coach.”

The people were carried away with excitement! The great steam-horse that we look at half a dozen times a day with indifference was thought to be the world’s greatest wonder. And George Stephenson was the hero of the hour. As the train neared Manchester, the people in their excitement broke all bounds, and even the military could not keep order, as they swarmed on the carriage like bees, and hung on to the handles, many of them being tumbled off, while shoutings and cheers went up from a thousand throats.

And now that he was successful, now that people praised where they had blamed, and pandered where they had scoffed, the man remained the same—modest, single-minded, just what he had been as the boy earning his shilling a day by driving the old “gin” horse at the pit’s mouth.

And now from the humble labourer’s cottage he had climbed to the highest heights of fame. He was the first mechanical genius in the eyes of the world. The greatest in the land rejoiced to honour him. From the depths of poverty he had risen to wealth. Honours flowed in upon him. But the “boy is father to the man,” and it was peculiarly true of George Stephenson.

“I never want,” he had said long years before, when he was earning £100 a year, and was able to keep a horse, “I never want to be higher.”

He was much the same as in those old days. There was no dazzling him with worldly display or worldly honours. He cared little for social distinctions. His instincts all along had been “to dwell among his own people.” It gave him the keenest pleasure to have a day at Newcastle among the scenes of his boyhood, looking up the simple friends of his youth. And his tastes, too, remained in many ways just the old simple ones. When he was an old man, and nearing the end of his pilgrimage, when he was surrounded by every luxury of table and otherwise, he would call for a “crowdie,” and with the basin of boiling water between his knees, would stir in the oatmeal with his own hands, watching it with great satisfaction, and then sup the whole with sweet milk, pronouncing it “capital.”

His last days were very peaceful. He removed from the swirling current of business life into a side eddy, when he was about sixty, to a place called Tapton, where he lived a quiet life, meditating among his beasts and birds and flowers, reading in each something of the beauty of the mind of a Greater Inventor than he. He took no part in business life, leaving it to his son, though now and then he would hear from afar echoes from the old world as the old war-horse scents the smoke of battle.

There was no long illness to mar the end of his splendid energetic life. Those who had known him in the full tide and flush of health had not the pain of noting either physical or mental decay. He was at a meeting in connection with engineering in July. Some weeks later he took a severe fever, and after ten day’s illness, without much suffering, the end came. On the 12th August, in his sixty-seventh year, George Stephenson, the great engineer, passed away.

The whole civilised world bewailed his going. He had lived long enough for it to realise and appreciate the mark he had made on the age. But most of all did the colliers mourn him—the men to whom he had been as a kindly father, a leader, a hero. They laid him in the quiet little churchyard at Chesterfield, and they raised monuments to him all over the country, as a grateful people will do,—erected statues and memorial schools, and painted portraits. But a man like George Stephenson needs no memorial of stone. He has left an undying work to speak for him, and a character that has moved men to admiration everywhere for its simplicity, combined with its greatness, its manliness, that made it possible for him, the poor collier’s son, to meet on equal ground—himself also being a man—men of the highest rank in the land.