George and Robert Stephenson

By Smiles, Samuel

Book Id: WPLBN0002952842
Format Type:
File Size: 369.34 MB
Reproduction Date: 2010

Title:	George and Robert Stephenson
Author:	Smiles, Samuel
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non-fiction, Biography
Collections:	Audio Books Collection, George and Robert Stephenson
Historic Publication Date:	1904
Publisher:	LibriVox Audio Books


Citation APA MLA Chicago Smiles, B. S. (1904). George and Robert Stephenson. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.us/

Description
George Stephenson did not invent the steam engine, that was due to Newcomen and later to James Watt. He did not invent the steam locomotive, that was due to a number of people including Cugnot, Trevithick and others. He did not invent the Railway. Railways or tramways had been in use for two hundred years before Stephenson. The reason why Stephenson was known as ‘The father of the steam locomotive’ was that he took a primitive, unreliable and wholly uneconomic device and turning it into an efficient machine not very different to those which ran until fifty or so years ago, married it with the iron rail and alone, and against considerable opposition,began, via the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and then the London and Birmingham Railway, the development of steam railways in England and the world. George Stephenson began life in 1781 in the worst and poorest of all circumstances, he did not learn to read until he was twenty years old, but he, together with his son Robert, became the foremost engineers in the railway world. If, in the middle years of the nineteenth century you wanted to build a railway, then, if you wanted it big bold and imaginative you might go to Mr. Brunel. If you wanted it to pay however, you would go to the Sephensons. (Summary by AJM)

Summary
Electronic recorded live performance of a reading

Excerpt
Biography