GEORGE STEPHENSON

		In his fourteenth year he became assistant to his father, who was fireman at a colliery, and in 1812 he was appointed to manage the engine at Killingworth Colliery. Meanwhile he had been educating himself, chiefly in the science of mechanics, with the result that he obtained permission from Lord Ravensworth to construct a travelling engine for the colliery tramway. This he accomplished in 1814, and next year he introduced a great improvement in the shape of the steam-blast. In 1822 he succeeded in inducing the projectors of the Stockton and Darlington Railway to adopt an improved locomotive. He was then employed to construct the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the directors of which accepted his locomotive called the Rocket, which at the trial trip in 1830 ran 29 miles in an hour. He was afterwards identified with numerous railway undertakings, and he was also the inventor of a miner's safety-lamp.
George Stephenson, engineer, born at Wylam, near Newcastle, in 1781, and died in 1848.

ROBERT, his son, born in 1803, died 1859, was educated at Newcastle; apprenticed to a coal-viewer at Killingworth, and attended the science classes in Edinburgh University. Afterwards he assisted his father in the survey of various railway lines; and was subsequently employed in railway undertakings both at home and abroad. His most notable engineering achievements were the construction of the high-level bridge at Newcastle-on-Tyne, the railway bridge at Berwick-on-Tweed, the tubular bridge over the Menai Straits, and the Victoria tubular bridge over the St. Lawrence in Canada.

The engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the great Western Railway from London to Bristol with rails 7 ft apart instead of the usual 4 ft 8½ in. He commissioned the Stephenson's to build the first locomotive, North Star, in 1837. The wide gauge gave a better ride, but after 50 years standard 4 ft 8½ in. gauge was accepted as the system of the future.