The Locomotive, like the condensing engine, exhibits the realisation of various capital, but wholly distinct, ideas, promulgated by many ingenious inventors. Stephenson, like Watt, exhibited a power of selection, combination, and invention of his own, by which—while availing himself of all that had been done before him, and superadding the many skilful contrivances devised by himself—he was at length enabled to bring his engine into a condition of marvellous power and efficiency. He gathered together the scattered threads of ingenuity which already existed, and combined them into one firm and complete fabric of his own. He realised the plans which others had imperfectly formed; and was the first to construct, what so many others had unsuccessfully attempted, the practical and economical working locomotive.
Mr. Stephenson’s close and accurate observation provided him with a fulness of information on many subjects, which
often appeared surprising to those who had devoted to them a special study. On one occasion the accuracy of his knowledge of birds came out in a curious way at a convivial meeting of railway men in London. The engineers and railway directors present knew each other as railway men and nothing more. The talk had been all of railways and railway politics. Mr. Stephenson was a great talker on those subjects, and was generally allowed, from the interest of his conversation and the extent of his experience, to take the lead. At length one of the party broke in with “Come now, Stephenson, we have had nothing but railways; cannot we have a change and try if we can talk a little about something else?” “Well,” said Mr. Stephenson, “I’ll give you a wide range of subjects; what shall it be about?” “Say birds’ nests!” rejoined the other, who prided himself on his special knowledge of this subject. “Then birds’ nests be it.” A long and animated conversation ensued: the bird-nesting of his boyhood, the blackbird’s nest which his father had held him up in his arms to look at when a child at Wylam, the hedges in which he had found the thrush’s and the linnet’s nests, the mossy bank where the robin built, the cleft in the branch of the young tree where the chaffinch had reared its dwelling—all rose up clear in his mind’s eye, and led him back to the scenes of his boyhood at Callerton and Dewley Burn. The colour and number of the bird’s eggs, the period of their incubation, the materials employed by them for the walls and lining of their nests, were described by him so vividly, and illustrated by such graphic anecdotes, that one of the party remarked that, if George Stephenson had not been the greatest engineer of his day, he might have been one of the greatest naturalists.
His powers of conversation were very great. He was so thoughtful, so original, and so suggestive. There was scarcely a department of science on which he had not formed some novel and sometimes daring theory. Thus Mr. Gooch, his pupil, who lived with him when at
Liverpool, informs us that when sitting over the fire, he would frequently broach his favourite theory of the sun’s light and heat being the original source of the light and heat given forth by the burning coal. “It fed the plants of which that coal is made,” he would say, “and has been bottled up in the earth ever since, to be given out again now for the use of man.” His son Robert once said of him, “My father flashed his bull’s eye full upon a subject, and brought it out in its most vivid light in an instant: his strong common sense, and his varied experience operating upon a thoughtful mind, were his most powerful illuminators.”
Mr. Stephenson had once a conversation with a watchmaker, whom he astonished by the extent and minuteness of his knowledge as to the parts of a watch. The watchmaker knew him to be an eminent engineer, and asked him how he had acquired so extensive a knowledge of a branch of business so much out of his sphere. “It is very easy to be explained,” said Mr. Stephenson; “I worked long at watch-cleaning myself, and when I was at a loss, I was never ashamed to ask for information.”
Towards the close of his life he frequently went down to Newcastle, and visited the scenes of his boyhood. “I have been to Callerton,” said he one day to a friend, “and seen the fields in which I used to pull turnips at twopence a day; and many a cold finger, I can tell you, I had.”
His hand was open to his former fellow-workmen whom old age had left in poverty. To poor Robert Gray, of Newburn, who acted as his bridesman on his marriage to Fanny Henderson, he left a pension for life. He would slip a five-pound note into the hand of a poor man or a widow in such a way as not to offend their delicacy, but to make them feel as if the obligation were all on his side. When Farmer Paterson, who married a sister of George’s first wife, Fanny Henderson, died and left a large young family fatherless, poverty stared them in the face. “But ye ken,” said our informant, “George struck in fayther for them.”
And perhaps the providential character of the act could not have been more graphically expressed than in these simple words.
On his visit to Newcastle, he would frequently meet the friends of his early days, occupying very nearly the same station, whilst he had meanwhile risen to almost world-wide fame. But he was no less hearty in his greeting of them than if their relative position had continued the same. Thus, one day, after shaking hands with Mr. Brandling on alighting from his carriage, he proceeded to shake hands with his coachman, Anthony Wigham, a still older friend, though he only sat on the box.