question of locomotives and railways. He was now beginning to
learn that much unnecessary wear and tear arose on the short lines
of rail down from the pit's mouths to the loading-places on the
river by the inequalities and roughnesses of the joints; and he
invented a method of overlapping the rails which quite got over
this source of loss--loss of speed, loss of power, and loss of
material at once. It was in 1819 that he laid down his first
considerable piece of road, the Hetton railway. The owners of a
colliery at the village of Hetton, in Durham, determined to replace
their waggon road by a locomotive line; and they invited the now
locally famous Killingworth engine-wright to act as their engineer.
Stephenson gladly undertook the post; and he laid down a railway of
eight miles in length, on the larger part of which the trucks were
to be drawn by "the iron horse," as people now began to style the
altered and improved locomotive. The Hetton railway was opened in
1822, and the assembled crowd were delighted at beholding a single
engine draw seventeen loaded trucks after it, at the extraordinary
rate of four miles an hour--nearly as fast as a man could walk.
Whence it may be gathered that Stephenson's ideas upon the question
of speed were still on a very humble scale indeed.

Before the Hetton railway was opened, however, George Stephenson
had shown one more proof of his excellence as a father by sending
his boy Robert, now nineteen, to Edinburgh University. It was a
serious expense for a man who was even now, after all, hardly more
than a working man of the superior grade; but George Stephenson was
well repaid for the sacrifice he thus made on behalf of his only
son. He lived to see him the greatest practical engineer of his
own time, and to feel that his success was in large measure due to
the wider and more accurate scientific training the lad had