"Puffing Billy" was in every respect a most remarkable piece of machinery, and its constructer one of the most sagacious and persistent of men. But how was the public, ever slow in discovering true merit or accepting real benefits, to discover and appreciate them? Neither influence, education, nor patronage had Stephenson to command mind and means, or to drive his engine through prejudice, indifference, and opposition, to profit and success.
But what he could not do, other men could do, and did do. Find a hook, and there is an eye to fit it somewhere. Yes; there were already men of property and standing alive with the new idea. While he worked, they talked—as yet unknown to one another, but each by himself clearing the track for a grand junction.
One of these men was Edward Pease, a rich Quaker of Darlington, who, his friends said, "could look a hundred miles ahead." He needed a quicker and easier transit for his coals from the collieries north of Darlington to Stockton, where they were shipped; and Mr. Pease began to agitate, in his mind, a railroad. A company for this purpose was formed, chiefly of his own friends, whom he fairly talked into it. Scarcely twenty shares were taken by the merchants and shipowners of Stockton, whose eyes were not open to the advantage it would by-and-by be to them. A survey of the proposed road was made, when to the indifference of the many was added the opposition of the few. A duke was afraid for his foxes! Shareholders in the turnpikes declared it would ruin their stock. Timid men said it was a new thing, and that it was best to let new things alone. The world would never improve much under such counsel. Edward Pease was hampered on all sides. Nobody convinced him that his first plan was not the right one by all odds; but what can a man do in any public enterprise without supporters? So he reluctantly was obliged to give up his rail-road, and ask Parliament for liberty to build a tram-road—horse-power instead of steam-power: he could seem to do no better, and even this was gotten only after long delay and at considerable cost.
Among the thousands who carelessly read in the newspapers the passage through Parliament of the Stockton and Darlington Act, there was one humble man whose eye kindled as he read it. In his bosom it awakened a profound interest. He went to bed and got up brooding over it. He was hungry to have a hand in it; until at last, yearning with an irrepressible desire to do his own work in the world, he felt he must go forth to seek it.
One night a couple of strangers knocked at the door of Edward Pease's house in Darlington, and introduced themselves as two Killingworth colliers. One of them handed the master of the mansion a letter of introduction from a gentleman of Newcastle, recommending him as a man who might prove useful in carrying out his contemplated road.
To support the application, a friend accompanied him.
The man was George Stephenson, and his friend was Nicholas Wood. It did not take long for Edward Pease to see that Stephenson was precisely the man he wanted.
THE TWO STRANGERS.
"A railway, and not a tram-road," said Stephenson, when the subject was fairly and fully opened.