guineas is a fortune and a capital to a working man. He was
therefore rich enough, not only to send little Robert to school,
but even to buy him a donkey, on which the boy made the journey
every day from Killingworth to Newcastle. This was in 1815, when
George was thirty-four, and Robert twelve. Perhaps no man who ever
climbed so high as George Stephenson, had ever reached so little of
the way at so comparatively late an age. For in spite of his
undoubted success, viewed from the point of view of his origin and
early prospects, he was as yet after all nothing more than the
common engine-wright of the Killingworth collieries--a long way off
as yet from the distinguished father of the railway system.

George Stephenson's connection with the locomotive, however, was
even now beginning. Already, in 1816, he and his boy had tried a
somewhat higher flight of mechanical and scientific skill than
usual, in the construction of a sun-dial, which involves a
considerable amount of careful mathematical work; and now George
found that the subject of locomotive engines was being forced by
circumstances upon his attention. From the moment he was appointed
engine-wright of the Killingworth collieries, he began to think
about all possible means of hauling coal at cheaper rates from the
pit's mouth to the shipping place on the river. For that humble
object alone--an object that lay wholly within the line of his own
special business--did the great railway projector set out upon his
investigations into the possibilities of the locomotive. Indeed,
in its earliest origin, the locomotive was almost entirely
connected with coals and mining; its application to passenger
traffic on the large scale was quite a later and secondary
consideration. It was only by accident, so to speak, that the true
capabilities of railways were finally discovered in the actual