“You are Geordie Stephenson, the engine-wright of the Killingworth Collieries, ’beant you?”
“Ay; and we have to haul coal some miles to the Tyne where it can be shipped. So you do away with all rack-work rails and all cogged wheels, do you?”
“Ay, ay, Geordie, that’s so—smooth wheels on smooth rails.”
This conversation, imaginary though to some extent it be, yet embodies some important facts. Jonathan Foster, Mr. Blackett’s engine-wright, informed Mr. Samuel Smiles, who mentions the circumstance in his “Lives of the Engineers,” that George Stephenson “declared his conviction that a much more effective engine might be made, that should work more steadily and draw the load more effectively.”
Geordie had studied the steam-engine most diligently. Born at Wylam—some eight miles distant from Newcastle, about thirty years previously—he had become a fireman of a steam-engine and had been wont to take it to pieces in his leisure. He was now thinking over the subject of building a locomotive engine, and he decided to see what had already been accomplished. He would profit by the failures and successes of others. So he went over to Wylam to see Mr. Blackett’s engines, and to Coxlodge Colliery to see Mr. Blenkinsop’s from Leeds; and here again it is said, that after watching the machine haul sixteen locomotive waggons at a speed of about three miles an hour, he expressed the opinion that “he thought he could make a better engine than that, to go upon legs.”
A man named Brunton did actually take out a patent in 1813 for doing this. The legs were to work alternately, like a living creature’s. The idea which seems to have troubled the early inventors of the locomotive, was that smooth wheels would not grip smooth rails to haul along a load. And it was Blenkinsop of Leeds who took out a patent in 1811 for a rack-work rail into which a cog-wheel from his engine should work.
Thus William Hedley’s idea of trusting to the weight of the engine to grip the rails, and abolishing all the toothed wheels and legs and rack-work for this purpose on a fairly level rail, was the first great step toward making the locomotive a practicable success.
