What did George think then? He more than ever wanted to try his hand at the business. Lord Ravensworth, knowing enough of Stephenson to have faith in him, hearing of this, advanced means for the enterprise. Good tools and good workmen were alike wanting; but after much labour, alteration, and anxiety, in ten months' time the engine was completed and put on the railway, July 25, 1814.
Although the best yet made, it was awkward and slow. It carried eight loaded waggons of thirty tons' weight at a speed not above four miles an hour. The want of springs occasioned a vast deal of jolting, which damaged the machinery, and at the close of a year's trial it was found about as costly as horse-power.
How to increase the power of his engine—that was the puzzling question which George studied to answer. He wrestled with it day and night, and at length determined to try again. In due time another was built, "Puffing Billy," which most persons looked upon as a marvel, but, shaking their heads, prophesied it would make a terrible blow-up some day. "Puffing Billy," however, went to work, and worked steadily on, a vast advance on all preceding attempts. It attracted little or no attention outside the narrow circle of the collieries. The great men of England did not know that in a far-off nook of the realm there was slowly generating a power, under the persistent thought of a humble working-man, which, before many years, would revolutionize the trade of the kingdom and create a new source of wealth.
"Puffing Billy," in fact, humble as its pretensions were, has proved to have been the type of all locomotives since.
Had George Stephenson satisfied himself? No. His evenings were chiefly spent at home with his son Robert, now under him in the colliery, studying and discussing together how to evoke the hidden power yet pent up in "Puffing Billy." The son was even more sanguine than his father, and many an amendment had "Billy" to undergo to satisfy the quick intellect and practical judgment of the youth.
Mr. Stephenson, delighted with Robert's scientific tastes and skill, and ever alive to the deficiencies of his own education, was anxious to give him still further advantages. For this purpose he took him from a promising post at the colliery and sent him to the University of Edinburgh.
Here he enjoyed a six months' course of study; and so well prepared was he for it by his wellformed habits of application and thinking, that he gained in six months as much as many a student did in three years. Certain it was his father felt amply repaid for the draft it made on his purse, when Robert reappeared at the cottage in the spring, with a prize for successful scholarship in mathematics. He was eighteen then.
