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 course of
their practical employment. George Stephenson was not the first person
to construct either a locomotive or a tramway. Both were already in use,
in more or less rude forms, at several collieries. But he _was_ the
first person to bring the two to such a pitch of perfection, that what