← Stuff You Missed in History Class
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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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Hey, it's Joel and Matt from How To Money. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back prices, they're still high and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right, yeah.
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Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference and kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How To Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.
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And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
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So today's topic has come up on the show before. He came up recently, very briefly in our Self Help Books episode. He also came up in our two parter on Sir Humphry Davy. He was one of the people who also invented a miner safety lamp. Got involved in a rather heated argument over who did it first, but he is most well known for his work on locomotives and railways. He's often called the father of railways and that is George Stephenson, and we are going to talk about him today.
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George Stephenson was born on June 9, 1781 in Wylam, England, which is in the county of Northumberland. His parents, Robert and Mabel Carr Stevenson, were quite poor. Robert worked as a fireman at the Wylam colliery. This was one of several jobs working in coal that he had in his life, and that is because coal pits would be opened up very quickly, mined to exhaustion and then closed. So people had to follow the trail of new mine openings to make a list. Living that meant consequently working in coal was a nomadic life. George was the second of six children and when he was born, the Stevensons were living with three other families in a small cottage that was less than 2 yards from a wooden railway that was used for horse drawn carts carrying coal from the mines.
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And George followed in his father's footsteps. He did not go to school and he started working when he was a child of eight. This was really quite normal for children in coal mining villages. Neither of George's parents could read or write and they also had started working when they were just kids. George's first job was watching a neighbor's cows and horses and helping in the garden. But he started colliery work not much later. He started out as a picker, meaning he Picked things like metal and slate out of the coal. He then moved on to a job driving one of the horses that pulled mine carts. But eventually he moved up again and made his way to his father's assistant.
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George grew up around early steam powered technology, but from the blue collar side of it. His father operated a Newcomen atmospheric steam engine at the local colliery. This was an engine developed by preacher and inventor Thomas Newcomen in 1712. It was designed to pump water out of mines. The water that was pumped out by the engine would then be routed to water wheels to provide power for other equipment. Stevenson became a Newcomen operator when he was still a teenager. George's siblings also went to work when they were still children. And all of the boys worked at the colliery?
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Yeah, his sisters did domestic work. But George was also really interested in the world and he was curious by nature. He was absolutely fascinated by anything mechanical and he loved to take things apart and then put them back together. So working in the mines meant that he had a lot of equipment around that he could examine and sometimes work on. He would also create models of engines out of clay. But he also loved animals. When he was a boy tending cows, he liked to search for birds nests as he went about his days. And he really loved blackbirds in particular, he had as a boy a blackbird that became so accustomed to him that it became a pet and it slept at the head of his bed each night. He also kept rabbits that he caught. There are many stories of him throughout his life making friends with wild animals and turning them into pets.
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As he was becoming an adult, he decided to go after the education he hadn't been able to get when he was younger. He had gotten into his adolescence still not knowing how to read or write. But he knew if he wanted to know more about the world, he needed to learn. He started taking classes at night after his full day shifts at the mines. One of his motivations, according to the biography written by Samuel Smiles in 1857, was that because George and the other men at the colliery knew about Napoleon's movements in Europe, they wanted more details, but nobody could read the newspaper. He also wanted to learn more about keeping animals. For all of these things, he was going to need to learn how to read. And then, in addition to matters of personal interest, he knew that if he wanted to advance in his career, that reading was a necessity. To be clear, with this, he started at the very beginning. In his earliest lessons, he had to learn the Alphabet because he had never been taught even that. He was 19 when he learned to write his name for the first time. Once he mastered reading, George also started taking lessons in arithmetic. This early education set him on a path of lifelong learning. He continued to study various subjects all through his life, often on his own in the evenings after work.
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Yeah, it sounds based on descriptions, like he wasn't just casually like, oh, I think I'm gonna read this book next. Like he was kind of putting together little curricula for himself and being like, this month I'm going to study this, this month I'm going to learn about this, which is quite admirable. George met a woman named Frances Anderson during this time in his life. She was working as a domestic servant in the farmer's home where George had moved when his job took him away from his family home. He and Frances, who went by Fanny, got married in November 1802. Frances was older than him. I read differing numbers, some that said she was nine years older, some that said she was 12, but roughly a decade. He had actually wooed her sister Anne, unsuccessfully before he and Frances struck up a courtship. And this was, by all accounts, though, a very good match. And the pair had a very loving marriage. They seemed to be what everybody hopes for best friends. And they, they always chose each other's company in the evenings and in their spare time over other options of places they could be. Knowing that he needed to support a family, Stephenson sought to expand his income by diversifying his revenue streams, meaning he learned a lot of skills. He had already learned shoe repair before he met Fanny. He had actually resold a pair of her shoes while they were courting. And soon he also added clock repair to his repertoire. He also, at least according to some accounts, started cutting out clothing for the wives of his coworkers so they could get right to sewing it up. So he had his hands in a lot of activities.
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Just before the wedding, George started working as a brakesman at Willington Colliery. That came with a significant pay bump. A brakesman operates the winch at the top of the pit that brings the coal up out of a mine. This position was considered to be skilled labor, and so that's why it came with a pay increase. He also continued to take side jobs. At one point, he was so busy hauling cargo out of the holds of ships that he cut back his engine operator hours. And his friend William Fairbank took this dropped hours from him. This extra income had good timing, since George and Francis had a son 11 months after they got married. That was on October 16, 1803. They named their son Robert. George really adored Robert, and Robert would become an important collaborator with George as an adult. Less than a year after Robert's birth, the Stevensons moved again, this time to Killingworth for another brakesman position.
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Coming up, we're gonna get to a point in George's biography where his life takes some sad turns, so we're gonna pause before we get into that and hear from our sponsors. Unlike the people we normally talk about on the show, we are living in a time when Internet connectivity is a standard part of life for most people, and there is literally no way we could research and prepare our podcast without the Internet. If connectivity goes down for me, it can be really hard to make up that lost time. And for businesses, Internet connectivity is even more of a necessity. Spectrum Business keeps businesses of all sizes connected seamlessly with fast and reliable Internet, advanced Wi, Fi, phone, TV and mobile services. Spectrum business offers 100% US based customer support and they do it 24 7. That means you can always stay up and running no matter what hours your business keeps. Spectrum Business also will tailor connectivity solutions just for you. They will put a package together that is built for your business budget. Millions of business owners rely on Spectrum Business to keep them connected, so visit spectrum.combusiness to learn. More restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas.
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New Year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever.
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I am Matt and I'm Joel.
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We are from the how to Money podcast and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there.
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If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to how to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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What if mind control is real?
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If you could control the behavior of.
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Anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
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Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
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When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
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Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
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I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
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Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Nlp, AKA Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
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It's about engineering consciousness.
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Mind Games is the story of nlp, its crazy cast of Disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, nlp, might actually work.
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This is wild.
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Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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In the summer of 1805, Frances and George had another baby, a daughter. But the infant died when she was still a baby. Although accounts of her age at death vary quite a bit. Some say that she died after just a few weeks, others a few months. But Frances also became ill and she died of tuberculosis in 1806. So now George had to raise their son alone. And initially he hired a housekeeper to look after young Robert. And that was because he had been offered a lucrative temporary job in Montrose, Scotland. He may have also just needed some time away from his regular life to deal with his grief, which was considerable. George made this journey to Scotland on foot, and I looked it up on Google Maps, and according to that, that would have been about 68 hours worth of walking one way.
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When he returned, he learned that his housekeeper had married his younger brother. That honestly was great, but it meant that he did need a new housekeeper to help take care of his son. That job was eventually filled by his sister, Eleanor. The Stevenson family had a couple of financial and health hardships around this time. George's father, Robert, had been badly injured in a work accident and suffered steam burns and the loss of his vision. George saw to it that his father's debts were paid and that he was set up with everything he needed and also arranged to take care of all of the older Roberts expenses for the rest of his life. This, of course, significantly depleted the money he had saved up.
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Yeah, he had returned from Scotland with a good bit of money and more than two thirds of it was immediately used for this effort. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic wars had led to Britain expanding their militia and George was selected for conscription. He did have the option to pay for a substitute to serve in his stead. And he took that option because he wanted to stay near his family, particularly his son. And this was something a lot of wealthy families did as a matter of course. But George wasn't wealthy. He went broke doing this. And while he did feel like it was the right decision to stay with Robert, both Roberts really, he was also incredibly depressed to find himself with nothing. After years of working really hard and moving up the ladder in the collieries and being really frugal and careful with his money, he went right back to a brakesman job. To keep himself, his son and his.
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Father afloat, he took a temporary job in 1808 at the Westmore pit along with two other brakesmen. The terms of their contract gave the three brakesmen their pay based on how many loads they could pull in. So Stephenson wanted to find ways they could increase their productivity and all make more money from the job. So the first thing he did was watch the equipment and noted anything that stood out. And right away he noticed that the the ropes on the winding machine wore out much more quickly at the Westmore pit than on average. So he deduced that they were probably encountering more friction than was normal. He got permission to make some changes to the pulley system on the winch and this led to an immediate improvement in the system. He got in the habit of taking the machinery he was in charge of apart on Saturdays at the end of every work week. Then he would clean it and reassemble it. And as a consequence, that machine stayed in tip top shape all of the time. And Stevenson became an expert at every inner working.
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In 1910, a new pit was opened at Killingworth. This was known as the High Pit and it had a Newcomen engine to pump the water out of the mine shaft. But that engine was problematic. It never succeeded in clearing the water from the pit, no matter how hard its operators tried. So if the water couldn't come out of the pit, they couldn't go down in min it. George, who was back at Killingworth as a brakesman at this point, would often stop by the pit and watch this newcomen try and fail to pump. And he had actually told some of the mine managers when he saw this engine installed that he thought it was defective. But he was also just a brakesman, so his counsel was not really considered in the decisions of the mechanics. He also told one of the shaft sinkers, those are the people that drill down and create the shafts, that he thought he could probably fix that machine. After weeks of no progress with that engine, the sinker mentioned to his boss that George Stephenson thought that he had a solution. And after that information ran up the chain of command, it was decided that letting a brakesman try his hand at a repair couldn't make things anything worse. According to the Smiles biography, mining manager Ralph Dodds told George, I'll give you a fair trial and you must set to work immediately. We are clean, drowned out and cannot get a step further. The engineers hereabouts are all bet and if you really succeed in accomplishing what they cannot do, you may depend on it, I will make you a man for life.
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So George, as we've established, was very familiar with Newcomen Engines. He had worked with them from the time he was a teenager. He had hands on experience tinkering with them in those early jobs. He insisted that he had to pick the team of mechanics that he was going to work with. That caused some bruised egos. He also said his team needed to be of all one political affiliation. They either all needed to be Whigs or they all needed to be Tories. To avoid unnecessary friction and bickering among them. Holly did not find out which party they kind of landed on. I'm kind of curious. Were George's affiliations just flexible?
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I feel like George was not terribly interested in politics.
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Okay.
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He was interested in engines.
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Yeah, yeah. Once he had assembled his team, they took the entire engine apart piece by piece. And this was a huge machine, so it was a significant undertaking. Three days later, the whole thing was back together. And at first, it did not seem like it was going to work any better than when it first started. But within two days, the water in the mine had been completely pumped out. Ralph Dodds made good on his promise. He gave Stevenson a gift of £10 and then promoted him to the role of engineman at the High Pit. That came with a much higher salary than he had ever gotten before. His responsibilities and income grew even more the following year when the High Pit's engine, Wright, was killed in an accident. And George inherited that job.
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Yeah, he kind of moved into the position of management over the other mechanics. Throughout all of his career accomplishments and promotions, George had sought out teachers to improve his knowledge. And he really wanted to improve his math skills. He would get arithmetic assignments from this friend of his, John Wigham, who was very skilled at math. And he would work out problems during downtime at work or in the evenings, and then he would present, sent them to John for correction. Wigham also taught George how to draw up plans and basic mechanical diagrams. And then the two men actually worked together from a book to learn the laws of mechanics, which is the most charming, sweet thing I've ever heard.
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Over the years, George was also seeing to his son Robert's education. And when he had still been earning a pretty meager wage, he had made the decision that Robert would get an education. George later wrote, quote, in the earlier period of my career, when Robert was a little boy, I saw how deficient I was in education, and I made up my mind that he should not labor under the same defect, but that I would put him in a good school and give him a liberal training. I was, however, a poor man. And how do you think I managed? I betook myself to mending my neighbors clocks and watches at night after my daily labor was done. And thus I procured the means of educating my son. In 1815, when Robert was 12, he started attending a day school in Newcastle.
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Yeah, in addition to all those side jobs. This increase in pay really, really helped make this plan come to fruition. This step in Robert's education also, though, offers another glimpse into the ways that George continually sought to expand his own knowledge. So Robert would go to school during the day and then in the evenings, George would sit with Robert and review homework. But this wasn't a case of his father helping exactly. George was taking the opportunity to follow along with Robert's studies so that he could learn the same mathematical concepts that his son was being taught. George also gave his son assignments, like building a sundial for their cottage, so that he would learn to apply his knowledge to practical uses. And Robert, with the help of his father, did gain enough of an understanding of astronomy and math to make that sundial. They hung it outside their cottage and George pointed it out to everyone who visited. He was very proud of it and it moved to Robert's home later in life.
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One of George Stephenson's first big achievements as an inventor happened after he had visited another colliery to see their mobile steam boiler. This was a proto locomotive invented by John Blenkinsopp. Blenkinsop's wheeled steam boiler was intended to bring coal out of the mines. But that was a big ask. It meant this machine had to be able to run on the rails that had been tracked into the mine. But there were concerns about it that while it was powerful, it would never really have enough grip to pull itself and a load of coal. Blankensop came up with a solution, which was a ratchet wheel that had teeth that would set into a special track called a rack rail that had holes in it at intervals matching up with the wheel teeth. Blankensop's engine was really a marvel. It was natural for every engineer and mechanic in England to want to see it, and it was ingenious, but it also had problems. The rack rail tended to take a lot of strain. It needed a lot of repairs. And the one that Stevenson had gone to look at had a boiler explosion not long after that. While the coal industry was very interested in the idea of a locomotive, they were also a bit wary of the whole field up to that point.
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Yeah, Anytime there's A big, you know, disruptive change in technology.
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It's scary, especially if it explodes.
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Horses work just fine, and this one came with obvious danger. This was not Stevenson's first experience with the idea of a mobile steam engine. He had been thinking about these kinds of machines for a while, because the coal industry was really the driving force behind their development, and a lot of people had been talking about them. Stevenson thought there had to be a way to make a mobile steam boiler that didn't have the issues of reliability that Blenkinsop's did. And he started thinking about how the problem with the cogs might be solved. He made a serious and methodical study of Blankensopp's engine and all of the other engine attempts that had been developed in the early 19th century. And he made a list of all of their shortcomings. And then he set out to create something that would transcend all of those problems. And when he went to the owners of the Killingworth mines to tell them that he wanted to invent a locomotive, although that word didn't exist yet, they gave him the money to do it. To be clear, that word, of course, wasn't in use for railroad vehicles. It existed as a word, but it was going to soon change. Stephenson initially called his project a traveling engine.
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Over the course of several months, Stephenson and his crew worked to bring together the machine. And the result was the Blucher, which debuted on July 25, 1814. It is said to have been named after Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. Blucher outperformed the steam engines that inspired it. It was able to haul 30 tons of coal distributed among eight wagons at a rate of four miles an hour. It was put into work right away at the Killingworth colliery.
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But Stephenson was not entirely happy with the Bluker. Some parts of the mechanic of it were kind of cramped. It would make them difficult to work on if there was need for repair. And it wasn't always the smoothest in terms of movement. It would sometimes make these jerky lurches forward as the various cylinders driving it fired one after another. Additionally, the important question of whether this machine was more efficient and cost effective than carts pulled by horses was very much in doubt. Stevenson really looked at the Blucher as a first draft, and he really thought he could do better, so he kept working.
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The major revision he made to the design was the steam blast. This is the process of redirecting exhaust steam up the engine's chimney. The fuel for the Engine was coal burning. Coal heated the water in the boiler, and that created the steam that drove the pistons inside the cylinders, which turned the wheels. Prior to redirecting it, the steam had run through the engine cylinders, in the words of biographer Smiles quote, was at first allowed to escape into the open atmosphere with a hissing blast to the terror of horses and cattle. In watching the Bluker and analyzing its performance, Stephenson noticed how much more power this steam blast had than the smoke that left the chimney that vented off of the fire that heated the boiler. But Stephenson suspected, correctly, that if he could run that steam into the chimney through a pipe, then the air that was pulled in after it would increase the draft, that would significantly increase the intensity of the combustion in the furnace, kind of like a bellows would at a forge, it would create more energy. After initially testing this idea on the Blucher, Stevenson started working on a second engine with the steam blast incorporated into the design from the start, and he patented this new design on February 28, 1815.
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The next several years were prolific for Stevenson as an inventor. He built an estimated 16 locomotives at Killingworth. One of these locomotives, the Killingworth Billy, which Stevenson built in 1816, is in the collection of the Stevenson Steam Railway Museum. It is the oldest surviving locomotive built by Stevenson, and this is in part because he would often take apart earlier models to make new ones, so there are not a lot of survivors. Among those reported 16 witnessing a number.
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Of horrific mining accidents in which workers were injured and killed, being very aware of the danger of fire damp, that's methane gas that becomes highly flammable when mixed with air. That all led Stevenson to think about ways to improve the safety in the tunnels. In one instance, he went right into a colliery main that was on fire and asked for six brave men to follow him so they could douse the flames. He quickly worked with the volunteers to build a wall to seal off the main, choking the fire out by depriving it of air. There were still several fatalities that day, but if George had not plunged into the pit with the idea to wall off this fire, a lot more people would have died.
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In 1815, George gave a demonstration of the first iteration of a safety lamp that he had devised to allow illumination of mining pits while preventing fires. His lamp, which involved a glass cylinder that was then encased in a tin sleeve, allowed air to enter only through small holes. It had a slide on the bottom that could be moved to, in his words, regulate the quantity of air to be admitted. By the time the design was refined, it also had several of what he called capillary tubes that released air through a series of apertures. A flame could not successfully make it through these tubes. Stevenson's lamp design, nicknamed the Geordie, was soon in regular use at Killingworth and other mines in northern England.
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Of course, soon after that, Sir Humphry Davy revealed his own safety lamp and soon a battle was being waged over who had invented it first. The supporters of each man became locked in a passionate debate about who should get this accolade. Stevenson's working class upbringing worked against him in scientific circles. A lot of the era of the gentleman scientists, a lot of them had lots of extra money lying around. It seemed impossible that a colliery worker, and yes, even one who had engineered these huge step forward in locomotive engines, could be an inventor on the same level of the renowned chemist and inventor, Sir Humphry Davy. Davy was given a 2,000 pound award by the coal owners of England. They gave Stevenson a mere hundred guineas as kind of a consolation prize. Stevenson was insulted and his friends and supporters were furious and urged him to set that record straight.
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Yeah, he apparently, you know, spoke very much with an accent. He did not sound like a refined gentleman from London and that really hurt him when he spoke about this invention, even though he actually was. First, that urging of his friends resulted in a letter which was published in the papers and then it was also published later as part of a collection of many correspondences and documents on the matter. In George's open letter, which was dictated to his son, he opened with, quote, several of my friends having expressed a wish that I would lay an engraved plan of my safety lamp before the public with as correct an account of the dates of that invention as I am able, I have resolved to do so. And he included in this his designs was kind of a little pamphlet. He notated the date of October 21, 1815 as the first time he tested his lamp in the mine, which was successful with other tests following in the weeks directly after showing that he was working on his lamp well before anyone knew of Davy's efforts, so he could not have copied him. Supporters in northern England, through a committee led by the Earl of Strathmore, C.J. brandling collected money and awarded Stevenson £1,000 and a silver watch. He was given these at a formal dinner.
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If George was chagrined that he didn't get enough recognition for his lamp, he didn't really need to worry. He was about to embark on a series of projects that would really change the world. And we'll get to that. After a sponsor Break.
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As the hubbub over the LA debate died down, Stevenson turned his focus to the roads and railways used for coal transport. This was a time when none of these things were standardized and rail tracks were run right on the roads as a matter of course. You can still sometimes find roads that also have rail tracks embedded in them, but this was the only way you could find a rail at this point. Mines tended to put together their own rails to carry coal out and these were often bumpy and they caused needless wear and tear on the engines and cars because the rails would shift and cause bouncing. None them were really purpose designed. Those rails were also often made of cast iron. That meant that they were brittle, so that too needed to be considered. Stephenson worked to redesign the way that tracks were laid so that they were smoother and less likely to break. And he redesigned the wheels of locomotives so that they worked better on these newly designed tracks. He also redesigned the pistons and cylinders in the engine so that they doubled as springs, which reduced the jerking and bouncing of the engine when it did encounter bumps.
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In 1820, Stevenson got married for a second time to a woman named Elizabeth Hindmarsh. Betty, as she was called, was a farmer's daughter. Betty's brother had introduced the two of them a little more than a year before. There's not a lot of information about Betty, but the two of them seem to have been very happy together.
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That same year that he got married, 1820, he was hired to build a brand new railway which needed to be eight miles long. This was for the Hetton colliery and the project took two years. The new line opened on November 18, 1822 and it was the first railway intended exclusively for use by engines and not animal drawn carts, although some carts probably ran on it. George had sort of invented an entirely new career in this move. He was a builder of railroads.
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The next big railway project to come George Stephenson's way was the Stockton and Darlington railway. Stephenson did the survey work to lay out the path of the railway himself with several assistants. This project was to be 25 miles long, so the survey work took some time. Construction started in 1823 and Stevenson's newly formed company, Stevenson Co. Was contracted to build three steam engines for it. By this point, his son Robert was working with him. One evening, over a bottle of wine, Stevenson reportedly told his son and another man named John Dixon, quote, I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country, when mail coaches will go by railway and railroads will become the great highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel upon a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost insurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but what I have said will come to pass as sure as you live. I only wish I may live to see the day though that I can scarcely hope for as I know how slow all human progress is and with what difficulty I have been able to get the locomotive thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than 10 years successful experiment at Killingworth.
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Yeah, he knew. He knew these were going to become important. The Stockton and Darlington line opened on September 27, 1825 with an engine named Locomotion pulling a passenger car called Experiment. Stevenson drove the Locomotion himself and the people riding aboard Experiment were the first passengers to be conveyed by a steam locomotive. At times it moved as quickly as 12 miles per hour. That seemed a dizzying speed at the time, although often it moved at a much slower pace of 4-6 mph. This railway was a huge success although the Experiment passenger coach ended up being run by a contractor company and it was often drawn by a horse rather than a steam engine. And while initially this line was open for use by anyone who had a horse drawn wagon, it was sort of like a public street. That policy was eventually rolled back because it caused problems as more and more loads were running on the line via steam engine. Way too dangerous for horses to be involved.
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In 1826 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway act was passed in Parliament. After several years of preparations and surveying, this funded construction of the first ever intercity railway. George Stephenson had been on the project since the summer of 1824. As principal engineer he picked up the work of a surveyor named William James who had conducted earlier analysis of the land and determined a path for the railway. But by the time Stevenson was brought on, William James was in debtors prison. Stevenson attempted to perform a new survey with some changes to the route. But he ran into trouble with landowners who did not want him or a railway on their property. These were not people angrily shaking fists. They were making serious threats and brandishing guns. So he ended up turning in a revised version of James's work. And that was a mistake.
- [36:22]
D
James had been sloppy. He was a little bit, it sounds like of a flim flam man. There were errors in his survey and it was just not an accurate representation of the land that the line was supposed to pass through. And that meant that the Cost estimate that Stevenson had prepared based on the survey was also deeply flawed. He had underestimated its total cost by about £150,000. He was questioned about it all before the House of Commons and it became apparent he didn't really know what was going on with that planned route. He was fired and replaced by brothers George and John Rennie. And after they ran into problems with the board of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, they were booted and Stephenson was back on the project. Although there were ongoing internal struggles. The surveyor that had been brought on when the Rennies were hired, Charles Blacker Vignole, quit because he and Stevenson did just not get along. This was all such a huge and high stakes undertaking. It is kind of understandable that tensions would run high and people might clash. But it eventually shook out. This was a large enough project that Stevenson divided it into thirds and assigned a construction superintendent to each 10 mile section. Those were Joseph Locke, William Alcard and John Dixon.
- [37:45]
A
Stevenson moved to Liverpool for the construction of the line and the work began. One of the most challenging segments and an area that had been much discussed during the hearings on the survey was a bog known as Chat Moss. The initial plan was that the bog would be drained, but that turned out to be impossible. Stephenson came up with the idea to float the railway on the bog after embankments had been shored up with dry moss. It took a lot longer than expected and Stevenson was urged to abandon this whole plan numerous times. But he carried on employing hundreds of men to haul materials to dump into the bog until this finally worked. The floating railway worked and was often noted as being the smoothest part of the line. This was not the only instance where the railway had to cross less than ideal land to complete its course. And there were 64 bridges and viaducts built for the project.
- [38:46]
D
Yeah, that Chat Moss bridge is still there. Stevenson had made the shift away from cast iron for the rails and wrought iron was used for the line. This was much more reliable. It was smoother than cast iron and that was because it could be laid in much longer lengths.
- [39:02]
A
Lengths.
- [39:02]
D
He also established the gauge. The distance between rails at 4ft 8 and a half inches. That's 1,435 millimeters. There are a number of different stories as to why that was the measurement. Some of them are quite fanciful and delightful. As we mentioned earlier, railways and roads had not been standardized. Mining rails could be anywhere from 4 to 5ft wide. The most popular version of the story is that it was pretty standard for wagon wheels to be set at that width, like they would fall inside the rails. So if you were sharing the road with a train, both vehicles could work on it. That was what Stephenson had used at Killingsworth Colliery and he continued to use it after that. And this number eventually became known as the Stevenson Gauge and it was adopted as a standard gauge in the UK Gauge act of 1846. It's also standard for the most part around the world. I think I read a statistic that 55% of railways still use it.
- [40:02]
A
It. As the railway was under construction, another matter of debate arose, which was who would build the locomotives for it? Would it actually use steam locomotives? There had been a push for the use of fixed engines along the length of the line that would power winched cables that would attach to the various vehicles and propel them forward. Stephenson lobbied against this idea with just a lot of fervor. And of course, Stevenson wanted to be the one to build the locomotives for the line. There were other contenders, though, and a contest was announced with a 500 pound prize to see who could build the best locomotive. This was also a test to see if locomotive power really was the best way.
- [40:48]
D
As early work on the Liverpool and Manchester rail was underway, George's favorite collaborator, his son Robert, was out of the country. Robert had been in South America since the summer of 1824, and that travel happened for two reasons. One, the silver and gold mines in South America were in desperate need of engineers. And two, Robert had been ill for some time, possibly with tuberculosis. It gets mentioned, but it's unclear. And his doctor had suggested that he spend time in a warmer climate. So off he went. And when Robert returned to England in late 1827, he was immediately put to work on the design and construction of a new locomotive. For this contest, Robert designed an engine known as Rocket, in close collaboration with his father. At this point, Robert was working in their locomotive shop and George was in Liverpool and continuing to work on the railway.
- [41:42]
A
The Rocket and the other competitors got to Liverpool for the Rainhill Trials in October of 1829. There were five competitors total, including the Rocket, the Samparelle built by Timothy Hackworth, the Novelty built by the engineering firm of Brathwaite and Ericsson, the Perseverance from Timothy Burstall of Edinburgh, and the Cycloped, built by Thomas Brandreth. The Cycloped was immediately eliminated because it used horsepower, which was against the rules of the competition. But it really was no competition. None of the other engines could even finish and they had to withdraw. The Rocket not only competed the trial, it hit 29 miles an hour at one point, and it handily whipped through the trials like pushing and pulling carts filled with stones. When the Liverpool and Manchester line opened on September 15, 1830, Stevenson locomotives were the engines that ran it.
- [42:40]
D
Yeah, that one's kind of funny because a lot of people wrote in saying they were going to participate, but only this handful actually finished anything that they could bring. And there was another entry, I'm using air quotes because it was pulled by two guys. It wasn't even horsepower. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, don't even get on the track. From that moment, George Stephenson was so in demand that he had to constantly turn down jobs. He worked on multiple railway lines that slowly connected all of England's major municipalities. He also consulted and worked on many projects both in Europe and North America. When the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was founded in 1847 in London, he was the group's first president. By that point, his second wife, Betty had died and he was as retired as someone who seems dedicated to their work ever is. After he was widowed a second time, he became even more interested in things he had long loved, like gardening and cultivating unusual flora. He invented a method to grow a perfectly straightened cucumber. He basically grew the fruit in a glass tube. So his retirement sounds kind of idyllic.
- [43:51]
A
On July 26, 1848, he read a paper at a meeting of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers titled On the Fallacies of the Rotary Engine. It was the last time he attended a meeting. Stevenson died on August 12, 1848, after about a fever in Chesterfield, where he lived at the end of his life. All the businesses closed on the day of the funeral and there was a parade of railroad workers that followed his casket to Trinity Church where he was buried.
- [44:21]
D
Of course, his son went on to also do a lot of great things. Perhaps we will do an episode on Robert in the future. I don't know yet. There are memorials to George Stevenson all over the world in various places, because he really did change the world. For better or worse. We think about the railroad barons in the US and maybe it feels like for worse, but no, no progress. I have a cute listener mail that references my Ben Franklin plan.
- [44:49]
A
Oh, hooray. From our self help episodes.
- [44:52]
D
And since he first came up in the self help episode for me, not first, but recently, I thought it would be a good way to bookend it. This is from our listener Kelsey, who writes. Hi Ollie and Tracy. Happy New Year. I'm listening to you discuss your endless quest to get rid of stuff and not to accumulate more stuff while very slowly unpacking from my trip home for Christmas. I am very lucky to have such generous friends and family, but the prospect of finding places for the new stuff and needing to pare down the old stuff to make room is paralyzing. Baby, I feel you I guess we share Ben Franklin's struggle with orderliness. I disagree with him that you're a more virtuous person if you're tidy, but sometimes it's nice if your life at least looks like it's in order. Thanks for the spookily timely inspiration to just try we'll never be Marie Kondo, but I'm sure we can approach the orderliness we desire, if only for a little while until we inevitably have to do a stuff purge. Again, thanks for making history interesting and relevant to our present lives. I hope 2026 treats you both well. Attached are pictures of my very good boy Scooter, who I adopted last summer. He's my second black cat and from my own scientific research I can confirm that black cats are the best. Best Kelsey Black cats are the best There's a reason that black cats are delightful and it's because of a recessive allele called the non agouti allele in their genetics, which eliminates it's actually a recessive gene, but it's very common, so don't let recessive confuse you. It eliminates the striping that you would find in non solid color cats, particularly dark color cats, and it also is related to how dopamine receptivity happens in utero. So there is actually some science behind the idea that black cats tend to be really sweet in many ways.
- [46:47]
A
Our ones are really sweet. I love them. It's genetic.
- [46:49]
D
They're sweet. And Scooter is cute as pie. He looks like he might get into some adorable trouble. There is one particular picture of him on his back in what I call baby harp seal position because we have a cat that does that a lot and he looks so sweet and I just kind of pet his little tummy. No, he's precious. I have no doubt he is an angel and an absolute delight. Thank you so much for writing to us. If you would like to write to us and share your pet pictures. You don't have to have pet pictures. You can just write to us. You can send us pictures if you want or not. You can do that at history podcast@iheartradio.com you can also find the show on the iheartradio app and subscribe there or anywhere you listen to your favorite Podcasts.
- [47:41]
A
Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.