George Stephenson was born on the 9th of June 1781.
The year 1881 was therefore the hundredth since his birth,—completed "the centenary;" and it occurred to many thoughtful and influential persons as a right thing to do that it should be marked by some special mode of public celebration. For the man born just one hundred years before had done a great work in his day; a work the full benefit of which we are only now beginning to enjoy.
England is not ungrateful to the memory of her distinguished sons, and keeps many anniversaries with a good deal of pomp and circumstance. She does not forget a Shakespeare and a Burns, or a Wellington and a Nelson; she loves to remember the establishment of the first printing-press, and the victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo. Such being the case, it cannot be denied that there was a peculiar fitness in her doing honour to "the Father of Railways,"—to the man whose successful patience, energy, and courage have so largely added to the national wealth and developed the national resources.
A century ago, when Stephenson was born, no one had dreamed of or imagined such a thing as railway traffic. That great idea was reserved for the brain of the son of a colliery engine tenter; and we have seen in the foregoing pages under what discouragement, and in the face of what colossal difficulties, he conceived and carried it out. The steam-engine in use in his youth and manhood was a crude, awkward, and disjointed affair, always coming to grief, and incapable of any important work. The locomotive, as Stephenson found it, was nothing more than a clumsy stationary engine put on a clumsy truck, which rattled and shook as it crept along at the rate of four miles an hour, so that every moment it seemed about to tumble to pieces. And the railway on which it ran was not less imperfect; it was nothing more than a system of light thin rails, which rested, or at least were intended to rest, upon blocks of stone or rough wooden sleepers.
Stephenson, as we have seen, resolved upon reforming all this. He soon improved the track, giving it greater solidity and firmness; and then he turned to the engine, which he continued to perfect almost to the day of his death. There was much in the circumstances of the time to stimulate his activity. The coal trade was increasing largely, and those engaged in it were anxious to send their "black diamonds" over the country with all possible speed. They could no longer tolerate engines that rattled and jolted to and fro at the rate of only four miles an hour! They were ambitious, and wanted a speed of ten miles. Well, we know what Stephenson did: he invented an engine that attained fifteen miles an hour; and then, unresting and unhasting, he addressed himself to the task of extending—or, rather, creating—our railway system.
He succeeded: and now there are eighteen thousand miles of railway in England;[[1]] and our ordinary trains make thirty miles, our express trains fifty and sixty miles an hour; and millions of men and women travel where formerly only hundreds went; and journeys that occupied a day and a night, like the journey from London to Exeter, are accomplished in half-a-dozen hours. Why, we leave London at ten, and reach Edinburgh at seven the same evening; a journey which, when Stephenson was born, could not be performed under a couple of days and nights!
[1]: At the close of 1880 there were 17,700 miles, employing 300,000 persons, and 13,174 locomotives. In this vast net-work of iron roads a capital of not less than £70,000,000 is sunk, yielding an annual return of £30,000,000. Upwards of 600,000,000 journeys are made on the average every year.
So marvellous a tale reads like a romance from some Eastern fairy-book. Yet it is literally true, and the work has been done in the sight and memory of thousands of living men. Was it not a work which deserved "a centenary"?
And the man: did he not deserve it? If ever indomitable perseverance merited public applause, it was that of George Stephenson. We will say nothing more of the trials and labours of his early years; but even after he had made his engine, and undertaken to construct the first English railway, what obstacles he had to conquer, what difficulties to surmount! Both Houses of Parliament were against him; the world was against him. People were horrified at the thought of "turning the locomotive loose on the country." They drew dreadful pictures of the evil it would do. Families sitting by their own firesides, it was said, would not be safe. A runaway engine, twenty tons in weight, would dash through a whole line of houses, toppling them down one after the other like houses built of cards. How was such a monster to be controlled? A screw loose, or a wrong turn of the handle, and it would bound out of the control of its driver. Then, again, others would ask, who wanted to travel more than ten miles an hour? Who wanted to rush through the country at a rate which would take away the breath? Was it not "flying in the face of Providence"? Moreover, these new "trains" were to start exactly to the minute, and what could be more inconvenient? "It was the regular thing in those days to keep the carriage and four a whole hour waiting at the door, till every room of the house had been gone through several times to see that nothing was left behind."