North by Morley Paul

Author:Morley, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

72

1829

In October the news spread around England that a mechanic fairly obscure outside the north-east had achieved what had previously seemed impossible. At Rainhill, near Liverpool, in the presence of an eager awe-struck crowd, in a competition sponsored by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to find the best type of locomotive, George Stephenson with the assistance of his son Robert drove his Rocket steam engine over a prepared length of railway at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour. They were required to traverse the track twenty times back and forth, which made the distance about the same as a return trip between Liverpool and Manchester.

The L&MR had been formed to ensure that the increasing quantities of finished cloth being manufactured in Manchester could be swiftly delivered to the nearest deep-water port of Liverpool for export, and the raw cotton being delivered to Liverpool sent quickly to Manchester. George Stephenson, after some argument about the route and his qualifications as a self-taught engineer, was appointed to build the line. At the 1826 inquiry into the construction of the railway, in the face of considerable opposition and disbelief that he could actually do what he said he could, he attempted to convince a sceptical and technologically unschooled Parliament using not only highly complex language that verged on the apparently nonsensical but also speaking in his local Northumberland accent. To the sneering and profoundly uninformed southerners needing to be convinced, his north-east burr added a further layer of the incomprehensible. He was trying to persuade aloof, unmoved and technologically ignorant Parliament to allow him to propel manic-seeming forty-ton iron engines across untested man-made structures at speeds that defied logic while speaking in what was not yet known as Geordie. At first, Parliament refused permission. Eventually they relented, passed the act necessary for construction to begin, and George Stephenson was finally given the seemingly impossible job of making it all happen.

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