George Stephenson by Hunter Davies Page B

do the pulling, steam engines were fixed to the side of the tracks at uphill stretches and with the aid of lengths of ropes and chains they did the pulling. Many colliery wagon ways then became a mixture, with horses still doing the main pulling, but with stationary engines taking over for the hard uphill bits and gravity taking over down the inclined planes. This was the position when George first started in the collieries.
    The next important development, the most important of all, was the invention of the locomotive, a steam engine which could run on its own power, and this had nothing to do with George Stephenson. The inventor of this is agreed by all to have been Richard Trevithick, a brilliant Cornishman who had the misfortune to be born just slightly too early for his many ideas to be put into practice.
    Trevithick was born in 1771, ten years before Stephenson, the son of a Cornish tin mine captain, or manager as he would be called today. After school he became an engineer in the local mines and worked on ways of improving Watt’s stationary engines which were then being used in most mines. Under Watt’s patent, Watt got a royalty based on the saving in coal used in his machines compared with Newcomen’s. Trevithick produced several patent steam engines of his own which didn’t please Watt, who looked upon him as his chief rival in the south west of England and tried to bring actions against him.
    Trevithick, like Stephenson, was big and strong and fond of showing off his muscles. He was six feet two inches high and built in proportion and became known as the Cornish giant – as much for his size as his inventions. He threw sledge hammers over the tops of engine houses, then for a follow up he would write his name on a beam six feet from the floor with half a hundredweight hanging from his thumb. In a dispute with another mining engineer, an equally big man, Trevithick picked the man up by the waist and held him upside down, his boots against the ceiling. One might expect such behaviour from a rough uneducated pitman like Stephenson but not from a trained engineer and manager’s son to boot. But Trevithick was a surprising man in every way. He was headstrong, impetuous, moving on constantly from idea to idea, forever being hard up yet giving his money away the minute he had any.
    He completed his first full-sized locomotive in 1801, having been experimenting with some small-scale models for a couple of years. Other engineers in France and England, working independently, had drawn plans for a locomotive and some had even made models but Trevithick was the first who got one working properly. His first locomotive ran on roads, not rails, but it didn’t run for long. While going over a deep gully in the road at Camborne, Cornwall, the steering wheel broke, the locomotive got out of control and it crashed into a house. It doesn’t seem to have affected the high spirits of Trevithick and his friends. One of them, Davies Gilbert, described what happened next. ‘The Parties adjourned to the Hotel and comforted their Hearts with Roast Goose and proper drinks when, forgetful of the Engine, its Water boiled away, the Iron became red hot and nothing that was combustible remained either of the engine or the house.’
    It is difficult to imagine Stephenson allowing such a thing to happen. He would have been down on his hands and knees, taking the machine to pieces and repairing the faults somehow, even if it had taken days, with never a thought for the inner man. But as Mr Smiles has well told us, Stephenson was nothing if not a model of Perseverance.
    Trevithick went back to developing his stationary steam engines but in 1804 he successfully built another locomotive, this time to run on rails, and this time he used it to win a bet. While in Penydaren in South Wales, where he was supplying some stationary engines for the local iron works, a wager was arranged between a local ironmaster and a