Here George laboured harder than ever, as became the head of a
family. He was no more ashamed of odd jobs than he had been of
learning the alphabet. He worked overtime at emptying ballast from
ships; he continued to cobble, to cut lasts, and even to try his
hand at regular shoemaking; furthermore, he actually acquired the
art of mending clocks, a matter which lay strictly in his own line,
and he thus earned a tidy penny at odd hours by doctoring all the
rusty or wheezy old timepieces of all his neighbours. Nor did he
neglect his mechanical education meanwhile for he was always at
work upon various devices for inventing a perpetual motion machine.
Now, perpetual motion is the most foolish will-o'-the-wisp that
ever engaged a sane man's attention: the thing has been proved to
be impossible from every conceivable point of view, and the attempt
to achieve it, if pursued to the last point, can only end in
disappointment if not in ruin. Still, for all that, the work
George Stephenson spent upon this unpractical object did really
help to give him an insight into mechanical science which proved
very useful to him at a later date. He didn't discover perpetual
motion, but he did invent at last the real means for making the
locomotive engine a practical power in the matter of travelling.

A year later, George's only son Robert was born; and from that
moment the history of those two able and useful lives is almost
inseparable. During the whole of George Stephenson's long upward
struggle, and during the hard battle he had afterwards to fight on
behalf of his grand design of railways, he met with truer sympathy,
appreciation, and comfort from his brave and gifted son than from
any other person whatsoever. Unhappily, his pleasure and delight
in the up-bringing of his boy was soon to be clouded for a while by
the one great bereavement of an otherwise singularly placid and