(1823-1826)

SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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Between the years 1823 and 1833, Brown achieved a number of a firsts as a pioneer of internal-combustion engines. In 1824 he built a full-scale working model of a pumping engine; in 1826, a vehicle fitted with a gas vacuum engine ascended Shooters Hill in Kent; and in 1827 he conducted trials of a motor-driven boat on the Thames that were witnessed by Lords of the Admiralty. The principle of Brown's engine had been demonstrated by Cecil in 1820. A burning gas flame was extinguished within a closed cylinder, creating a partial vacuum; atmospheric pressure was then utilized to produce the working stroke. By 1832 a number of Brown's engines in use for pumping water were reported, the most notable being at Croydon Canal. However, high fuel consumption and running costs prevented a wide acceptance of Brown's engines, and a company formed in 1825 was dissolved only two years later. Brown continued alone with his work until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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There are two claimants for the person who originated the differential gear as applied to roving frames: one is J.Green, a tinsmith of Mansfield, in his patent of 1823; the other is Arnold, who had applied it in America and patented it in early 1823. This latter was the source for Houldsworth's patent in 1826. It seems that Arnold's gearing was secretly communicated to Houldsworth by Charles Richmond, possibly when Houldsworth visited the United States in 1822–3, but more probably in 1825 when Richmond went to England. In return, Richmond received information about parts of a cylinder printing machine from Houldsworth. In the working of the roving frame, as the rovings were wound onto their bobbins and the diameter of the bobbins increased, the bobbin speed had to be reduced to keep the winding on at the same speed while the flyers and drawing rollers had to maintain their initial speed. Although this could be achieved by moving the driving belt along coned pulleys, this method did not provide enough power and slippage occurred. The differential gear combined the direct drive from the main shaft of the roving frame with that from the cone drive, so that only the latter provided the dif-ference between flyer and bobbin speeds, i.e. the winding speeds, thus taking away most of the power from that belt. Henry Houldsworth Senior (1774–1853) was living in Manchester when his son Henry was born, but by 1800 had moved to Glasgow. He built several mills, including a massive one at Anderston, Scotland, in which a Boulton \& Watt steam engine was installed. Henry Houldsworth Junior was probably back in Manchester by 1826, where he was to become an influential cotton spinner as chief partner in his mills, which he moved out to Reddish in 1863–5. He was also a prominent landowner in Cheetham. When William Fairbairn was considering establishing the Association for the Prevention of Steam Boiler Explosions in 1854, he wanted to find an influential manufacturer and mill-owner and he made a happy choice when he turned to Henry Houldsworth for assistance.

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(1802-1866)

   The third son of King João VI and of Dona Carlota Joaquina, Miguel was barely five years of age when he went to Brazil with the fleeing royal family. In 1821, with his mother and father, he returned to Portugal. Whatever the explanation for his actions, Miguel always took Carlota Joaquina's part in the subsequent political struggles and soon became the supreme hope of the reactionary, clerical, absolutist party against the constitutionalists and opposed any compromise with liberal constitutionalism or its adherents. He became not only the symbol but the essence of a kind of reactionary messianism in Portugal during more than two decades, as his personal fortunes of power and privilege rose and fell. With his personality imbued with traits of wildness, adventurism, and violence, Miguel enjoyed a life largely consumed in horseback riding, love affairs, and bull- fighting.

   After the independence of Brazil (1822), Miguel became the principal candidate for power of the Traditionalist Party, which was determined to restore absolutist royal power, destroy the constitution, and rule without limitation. Miguel was involved in many political conspiracies and armed movements, beginning in 1822 and including the coups known to history as the "Vila Francada" (1823) and the "Abrilada" (1824), which were directed against his father King João VI, in order to restore absolutist royal power. These coup conspiracies failed due to foreign intervention, and the king ordered Miguel dismissed from his posts and sent into exile. He remained in exile for four years. The death of King João VI in 1826 presented new opportunities in the absolutist party, however, and the dashing Dom Miguel remained their great hope for power.

   His older brother King Pedro IV, then emperor of Brazil, inherited the throne and wrote his own constitution, the Charter of 1826, which was to become the law of the land in Portugal. However, his daughter Maria, only seven, was too young to rule, so Pedro, who abdicated, put together an unusual deal. Until Maria reached her majority age, a regency headed by Princess Isabel Maria would rule Portugal. Dom Miguel would return from his Austrian exile and, when Maria reached her majority, Maria would marry her uncle Miguel and they would reign under the 1826 Charter. Miguel returned to Portugal in 1828, but immediately broke the bargain. He proclaimed himself an absolutist King, acclaimed by the usual (and last) Cortes of 1828; dispensed with Pedro's Charter; and ruled as an absolutist. Pedro's response was to abdicate the emperorship of Brazil, return to Portugal, defeat Miguel, and place his young daughter on the throne. In the civil war called the War of the Brothers (1831-34), after a seesaw campaign on land and at sea, Miguel's forces were defeated and he went into exile, never to return to Portugal.

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Palmer was an assistant to Thomas Telford for ten years from 1816. In 1818 he arranged a meeting of young engineers from which the Institution of Civil Engineers originated. In the early 1820s he invented a monorail system, the first of its kind, in which a single rail of wood, with an iron strip spiked on top to form a running surface, was supported on posts. Wagon bodies were supported pannier fashion from a frame attached to grooved wheels and were propelled by men or horses. An important object was to minimize friction, and short lines were built on this principle at Deptford and Cheshunt. In 1826 Palmer was appointed Resident Engineer to the London Docks and was responsible for the construction of many of them. He was subsequently consulted about many important engineering works.

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See also: Lartigue, Charles François Marie-Thérèse

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Paper and printing

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Perkins's occupation was that of a gold-and silversmith; while he does not seem to have followed this after 1800, however, it gave him the skills in working metals which he would continue to employ in his inventions. He had been working in America for four years before he patented his nail-making machine in 1796. At the time there was a great shortage of nails because only hand-forged ones were available. By 1800, other people had followed his example and produced automatic nail-making machines, but in 1811 Perkins' improved machines were introduced to England by J.C. Dyer. Eventually Perkins had twenty-one American patents for a range of inventions in his name.

In 1799 Perkins invented a system of engraving steel plates for printing banknotes, which became the foundation of modern siderographic work. It discouraged forging and was adopted by many banking houses, including the Federal Government when the Second United States Bank was inaugurated in 1816. This led Perkins to move to Philadelphia. In the intervening years, Perkins had improved his nail-making machine, invented a machine for graining morocco leather in 1809, a fire-engine in 1812, a letter-lock for bank vaults and improved methods of rolling out spoons in 1813, and improved armament and equipment for naval ships from 1812 to 1815.

It was in Philadelphia that Perkins became interested in the steam engine, when he met Oliver Evans, who had pioneered the use of high-pressure steam. He became a member of the American Philosophical Society and conducted experiments on the compressibility of water before a committee of that society. Perkins claimed to have liquified air during his experiments in 1822 and, if so, was the real discoverer of the liquification of gases. In 1819 he came to England to demonstrate his forgery-proof system of printing banknotes, but the Bank of England was the only one which did not adopt his system.

While in London, Perkins began to experiment with the highest steam pressures used up to that time and in 1822 took out his first of nineteen British patents. This was followed by another in 1823 for a 10 hp (7.5 kW) engine with only 2 in. (51 mm) bore, 12 in. (305 mm) stroke but a pressure of 500 psi (35 kg/cm²), for which he claimed exceptional economy. After 1826, Perkins abandoned his drum boiler for iron tubes and steam pressures of 1,500 psi (105 kg/cm²), but the materials would not withstand such pressures or temperatures for long. It was in that same year that he patented a form of uniflow cylinder that was later taken up by L.J. Todd. One of his engines ran for five days, continuously pumping water at St Katherine's docks, but Perkins could not raise more finance to continue his experiments.

In 1823 one his high-pressure hot-water systems was installed to heat the Duke of Wellington's house at Stratfield Saye and it acquired a considerable vogue, being used by Sir John Soane, among others. In 1834 Perkins patented a compression ice-making apparatus, but it did not succeed commercially because ice was imported more cheaply from Norway as ballast for sailing ships. Perkins was often dubbed "the American inventor" because his inquisitive personality allied to his inventive ingenuity enabled him to solve so many mechanical challenges.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Textiles

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Richard Roberts was the son of a shoemaker and tollkeeper and received only an elementary education at the village school. At the age of 10 his interest in mechanics was stimulated when he was allowed by the Curate, the Revd Griffith Howell, to use his lathe and other tools. As a young man Roberts acquired a considerable local reputation for his mechanical skills, but these were exercised only in his spare time. For many years he worked in the local limestone quarries, until at the age of 20 he obtained employment as a pattern-maker in Staffordshire. In the next few years he worked as a mechanic in Liverpool, Manchester and Salford before moving in 1814 to London, where he obtained employment with Henry Maudslay. In 1816 he set up on his own account in Manchester. He soon established a reputation there for gear-cutting and other general engineering work, especially for the textile industry, and by 1821 he was employing about twelve men. He built machine tools mainly for his own use, including, in 1817, one of the first planing machines.

One of his first inventions was a gas meter, but his first patent was obtained in 1822 for improvements in looms. His most important contribution to textile technology was his invention of the self-acting spinning mule, patented in 1825. The normal fourteen-year term of this patent was extended in 1839 by a further seven years. Between 1826 and 1828 Roberts paid several visits to Alsace, France, arranging cottonspinning machinery for a new factory at Mulhouse. By 1826 he had become a partner in the firm of Sharp Brothers, the company then becoming Sharp, Roberts \& Co. The firm continued to build textile machinery, and in the 1830s it built locomotive engines for the newly created railways and made one experimental steam-carriage for use on roads. The partnership was dissolved in 1843, the Sharps establishing a new works to continue locomotive building while Roberts retained the existing factory, known as the Globe Works, where he soon after took as partners R.G.Dobinson and Benjamin Fothergill (1802–79). This partnership was dissolved c. 1851, and Roberts continued in business on his own for a few years before moving to London as a consulting engineer.

During the 1840s and 1850s Roberts produced many new inventions in a variety of fields, including machine tools, clocks and watches, textile machinery, pumps and ships. One of these was a machine controlled by a punched-card system similar to the Jacquard loom for punching rivet holes in plates. This was used in the construction of the Conway and Menai Straits tubular bridges. Roberts was granted twenty-six patents, many of which, before the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852, covered more than one invention; there were still other inventions he did not patent. He made his contribution to the discussion which led up to the 1852 Act by publishing, in 1830 and 1833, pamphlets suggesting reform of the Patent Law.

In the early 1820s Roberts helped to establish the Manchester Mechanics' Institute, and in 1823 he was elected a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. He frequently contributed to their proceedings and in 1861 he was made an Honorary Member. He was elected a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1838. From 1838 to 1843 he served as a councillor of the then-new Municipal Borough of Manchester. In his final years, without the assistance of business partners, Roberts suffered financial difficulties, and at the time of his death a fund for his aid was being raised.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Vignoles, who was of Huguenot descent, was orphaned in infancy and brought up in the family of his grandfather, Dr Charles Hutton FRS, Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. After service in the Army he travelled to America, arriving in South Carolina in 1817. He was appointed Assistant to the state's Civil Engineer and surveyed much of South Carolina and subsequently Florida. After his return to England in 1823 he established himself as a civil engineer in London, and obtained work from the brothers George and John Rennie.

In 1825 the promoters of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway (L \& MR) lost their application for an Act of Parliament, discharged their engineer George Stephenson and appointed the Rennie brothers in his place. They in turn employed Vignoles to resurvey the railway, taking a route that would minimize objections. With Vignoles's route, the company obtained its Act in 1826 and appointed Vignoles to supervise the start of construction. After Stephenson was reappointed Chief Engineer, however, he and Vignoles proved incompatible, with the result that Vignoles left the L \& MR early in 1827.

Nevertheless, Vignoles did not sever all connection with the L \& MR. He supported John Braithwaite and John Ericsson in the construction of the locomotive Novelty and was present when it competed in the Rainhill Trials in 1829. He attended the opening of the L \& MR in 1830 and was appointed Engineer to two railways which connected with it, the St Helens \& Runcorn Gap and the Wigan Branch (later extended to Preston as the North Union); he supervised the construction of these.

After the death of the Engineer to the Dublin \& Kingstown Railway, Vignoles supervised construction: the railway, the first in Ireland, was opened in 1834. He was subsequently employed in surveying and constructing many railways in the British Isles and on the European continent; these included the Eastern Counties, the Midland Counties, the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyme \& Manchester (which proved for him a financial disaster from which he took many years to recover), and the Waterford \& Limerick. He probably discussed rail of flat-bottom section with R.L. Stevens during the winter of 1830–1 and brought it into use in the UK for the first time in 1836 on the London \& Croydon Railway: subsequently rail of this section became known as "Vignoles rail". He considered that a broader gauge than 4 ft 8½ in. (1.44 m) was desirable for railways, although most of those he built were to this gauge so that they might connect with others. He supported the atmospheric system of propulsion during the 1840s and was instrumental in its early installation on the Dublin \& Kingstown Railway's Dalkey extension. Between 1847 and 1853 he designed and built the noted multi-span suspension bridge at Kiev, Russia, over the River Dnieper, which is more than half a mile (800 m) wide at that point.

Between 1857 and 1863 he surveyed and then supervised the construction of the 155- mile (250 km) Tudela \& Bilbao Railway, which crosses the Cantabrian Pyrenees at an altitude of 2,163 ft (659 m) above sea level. Vignoles outlived his most famous contemporaries to become the grand old man of his profession.

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See also: Samuda, Joseph d'Aguilar

( estampida [estampida] < estampía 'tumultuous race; abrupt departure' < estampar, of Germanic origin, probably from French estamper 'to crush; to mash')

   1) OED: 1826. As a noun, the mass bolting of frenzied cattle. Also, more generally, the sudden bolting of any herd of animals, or even of humans, as in a gold stampede or land stampede.

    Alternate form: stompede.

   2) Calgary, Alberta: 1912. By extension from (1), a southwestern celebration consisting of a rodeo and other contests and exhibitions.

   3) OED: 1823. As an intransitive verb, to take flight suddenly (generally said of a herd of cattle or other animals).

   4) OED: 1848. As a transitive verb, to cause a stampede (1), usually said of humans. This was a technique used by Indians and others to steal cattle. The Royal Academy defines estampida primarily as a sharp, loud noise, such as one made by the firing of a cannon. It also refers to the precipitous flight of a human or animal, or of a group of either of these. Spanish sources do not reference the term as a verb; usages (3) and (4) are extensions of (1).

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Joseph Locke was the son of a colliery viewer who had known George Stephenson in Northumberland before moving to Yorkshire: Locke himself became a pupil of Stephenson in 1823. He worked with Robert Stephenson at Robert Stephenson \& Co.'s locomotive works and surveyed railways, including the Leeds \& Selby and the Canterbury \& Whitstable, for George Stephenson.

When George Stephenson was appointed Chief Engineer for construction of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway in 1826, the first resident engineer whom he appointed to work under him was Locke, who took a prominent part in promoting traction by locomotives rather than by fixed engines with cable haulage. The pupil eventually excelled the master and in 1835 Locke was appointed in place of Stephenson as Chief Engineer for construction of the Grand Junction Railway. He introduced double-headed rails carried in chairs on wooden sleepers, the prototype of the bullhead track that became standard on British railways for more than a century. By preparing the most detailed specifications, Locke was able to estimate the cost of the railway much more accurately than was usual at that time, and it was built at a cost close to the estimate; this made his name. He became Engineer to the London \& Southampton Railway and completed the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyme \& Manchester Railway, including the 3-mile (3.8 km) Woodhead Tunnel, which had been started by Charles Vignoles. He was subsequently responsible for many British main lines, including those of the companies that extended the West Coast Route northwards from Preston to Scotland. He was also Engineer to important early main lines in France, notably that from Paris to Rouen and its extension to Le Havre, and in Spain and Holland. In 1847 Locke was elected MP for Honiton.

Locke appreciated early in his career that steam locomotives able to operate over gradients steeper than at first thought practicable would be developed. Overall his monument is not great individual works of engineering, such as the famous bridges of his close contemporaries Robert Stephenson and I.K. Brunel, but a series of lines built economically but soundly through rugged country without such works; for example, the line over Shap, Cumbria.

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See also: Brassey, Thomas

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Metallurgy, Public utilities, Telecommunications

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Born Carl Wilhelm, he attended craft schools in Lübeck and Magdeburg, followed by an intensive course in natural science at Göttingen as a pupil of Weber. At the age of 19 Siemens travelled to England and sold an electroplating process developed by his brother Werner Siemens to Richard Elkington, who was already established in the plating business. From 1843 to 1844 he obtained practical experience in the Magdeburg works of Count Stolburg. He settled in England in 1844 and later assumed British nationality, but maintained close contact with his brother Werner, who in 1847 had co-founded the firm Siemens \& Halske in Berlin to manufacture telegraphic equipment. William began to develop his regenerative principle of waste-heat recovery and in 1856 his brother Frederick (1826–1904) took out a British patent for heat regeneration, by which hot waste gases were passed through a honeycomb of fire-bricks. When they became hot, the gases were switched to a second mass of fire-bricks and incoming air and fuel gas were led through the hot bricks. By alternating the two gas flows, high temperatures could be reached and considerable fuel economies achieved. By 1861 the two brothers had incorporated producer gas fuel, made by gasifying low-grade coal.

Heat regeneration was first applied in ironmaking by Cowper in 1857 for heating the air blast in blast furnaces. The first regenerative furnace was set up in Birmingham in 1860 for glassmaking. The first such furnace for making steel was developed in France by Pierre Martin and his father, Emile, in 1863. Siemens found British steelmakers reluctant to adopt the principle so in 1866 he rented a small works in Birmingham to develop his open-hearth steelmaking furnace, which he patented the following year. The process gradually made headway; as well as achieving high temperatures and saving fuel, it was slower than Bessemer's process, permitting greater control over the content of the steel. By 1900 the tonnage of open-hearth steel exceeded that produced by the Bessemer process.

In 1872 Siemens played a major part in founding the Society of Telegraph Engineers (from which the Institution of Electrical Engineers evolved), serving as its first President. He became President for the second time in 1878. He built a cable works at Charlton, London, where the cable could be loaded directly into the holds of ships moored on the Thames. In 1873, together with William Froude, a British shipbuilder, he designed the Faraday, the first specialized vessel for Atlantic cable laying. The successful laying of a cable from Europe to the United States was completed in 1875, and a further five transatlantic cables were laid by the Faraday over the following decade.

The Siemens factory in Charlton also supplied equipment for some of the earliest electric-lighting installations in London, including the British Museum in 1879 and the Savoy Theatre in 1882, the first theatre in Britain to be fully illuminated by electricity. The pioneer electric-tramway system of 1883 at Portrush, Northern Ireland, was an opportunity for the Siemens company to demonstrate its equipment.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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George Stephenson was the son of the fireman of the pumping engine at Wylam colliery, and horses drew wagons of coal along the wooden rails of the Wylam wagonway past the house in which he was born and spent his earliest childhood. While still a child he worked as a cowherd, but soon moved to working at coal pits. At 17 years of age he showed sufficient mechanical talent to be placed in charge of a new pumping engine, and had already achieved a job more responsible than that of his father. Despite his position he was still illiterate, although he subsequently learned to read and write. He was largely self-educated.

In 1801 he was appointed Brakesman of the winding engine at Black Callerton pit, with responsibility for lowering the miners safely to their work. Then, about two years later, he became Brakesman of a new winding engine erected by Robert Hawthorn at Willington Quay on the Tyne. Returning collier brigs discharged ballast into wagons and the engine drew the wagons up an inclined plane to the top of "Ballast Hill" for their contents to be tipped; this was one of the earliest applications of steam power to transport, other than experimentally.

In 1804 Stephenson moved to West Moor pit, Killingworth, again as Brakesman. In 1811 he demonstrated his mechanical skill by successfully modifying a new and unsatisfactory atmospheric engine, a task that had defeated the efforts of others, to enable it to pump a drowned pit clear of water. The following year he was appointed Enginewright at Killingworth, in charge of the machinery in all the collieries of the "Grand Allies", the prominent coal-owning families of Wortley, Liddell and Bowes, with authorization also to work for others. He built many stationary engines and he closely examined locomotives of John Blenkinsop's type on the Kenton \& Coxlodge wagonway, as well as those of William Hedley at Wylam.

It was in 1813 that Sir Thomas Liddell requested George Stephenson to build a steam locomotive for the Killingworth wagonway: Blucher made its first trial run on 25 July 1814 and was based on Blenkinsop's locomotives, although it lacked their rack-and-pinion drive. George Stephenson is credited with building the first locomotive both to run on edge rails and be driven by adhesion, an arrangement that has been the conventional one ever since. Yet Blucher was far from perfect and over the next few years, while other engineers ignored the steam locomotive, Stephenson built a succession of them, each an improvement on the last.

During this period many lives were lost in coalmines from explosions of gas ignited by miners' lamps. By observation and experiment (sometimes at great personal risk) Stephenson invented a satisfactory safety lamp, working independently of the noted scientist Sir Humphry Davy who also invented such a lamp around the same time.

In 1817 George Stephenson designed his first locomotive for an outside customer, the Kilmarnock \& Troon Railway, and in 1819 he laid out the Hetton Colliery Railway in County Durham, for which his brother Robert was Resident Engineer. This was the first railway to be worked entirely without animal traction: it used inclined planes with stationary engines, self-acting inclined planes powered by gravity, and locomotives.

On 19 April 1821 Stephenson was introduced to Edward Pease, one of the main promoters of the Stockton \& Darlington Railway (S \& DR), which by coincidence received its Act of Parliament the same day. George Stephenson carried out a further survey, to improve the proposed line, and in this he was assisted by his 18-year-old son, Robert Stephenson, whom he had ensured received the theoretical education which he himself lacked. It is doubtful whether either could have succeeded without the other; together they were to make the steam railway practicable.

At George Stephenson's instance, much of the S \& DR was laid with wrought-iron rails recently developed by John Birkinshaw at Bedlington Ironworks, Morpeth. These were longer than cast-iron rails and were not brittle: they made a track well suited for locomotives. In June 1823 George and Robert Stephenson, with other partners, founded a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne to build locomotives and rolling stock and to do general engineering work: after its Managing Partner, the firm was called Robert Stephenson \& Co.

In 1824 the promoters of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway (L \& MR) invited George Stephenson to resurvey their proposed line in order to reduce opposition to it. William James, a wealthy land agent who had become a visionary protagonist of a national railway network and had seen Stephenson's locomotives at Killingworth, had promoted the L \& MR with some merchants of Liverpool and had carried out the first survey; however, he overreached himself in business and, shortly after the invitation to Stephenson, became bankrupt. In his own survey, however, George Stephenson lacked the assistance of his son Robert, who had left for South America, and he delegated much of the detailed work to incompetent assistants. During a devastating Parliamentary examination in the spring of 1825, much of his survey was shown to be seriously inaccurate and the L \& MR's application for an Act of Parliament was refused. The railway's promoters discharged Stephenson and had their line surveyed yet again, by C.B. Vignoles.

The Stockton \& Darlington Railway was, however, triumphantly opened in the presence of vast crowds in September 1825, with Stephenson himself driving the locomotive Locomotion, which had been built at Robert Stephenson \& Co.'s Newcastle works. Once the railway was at work, horse-drawn and gravity-powered traffic shared the line with locomotives: in 1828 Stephenson invented the horse dandy, a wagon at the back of a train in which a horse could travel over the gravity-operated stretches, instead of trotting behind.

Meanwhile, in May 1826, the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway had successfully obtained its Act of Parliament. Stephenson was appointed Engineer in June, and since he and Vignoles proved incompatible the latter left early in 1827. The railway was built by Stephenson and his staff, using direct labour. A considerable controversy arose c. 1828 over the motive power to be used: the traffic anticipated was too great for horses, but the performance of the reciprocal system of cable haulage developed by Benjamin Thompson appeared in many respects superior to that of contemporary locomotives. The company instituted a prize competition for a better locomotive and the Rainhill Trials were held in October 1829.

Robert Stephenson had been working on improved locomotive designs since his return from America in 1827, but it was the L \& MR's Treasurer, Henry Booth, who suggested the multi-tubular boiler to George Stephenson. This was incorporated into a locomotive built by Robert Stephenson for the trials: Rocket was entered by the three men in partnership. The other principal entrants were Novelty, entered by John Braithwaite and John Ericsson, and Sans Pareil, entered by Timothy Hackworth, but only Rocket, driven by George Stephenson, met all the organizers' demands; indeed, it far surpassed them and demonstrated the practicability of the long-distance steam railway. With the opening of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway in 1830, the age of railways began.

Stephenson was active in many aspects. He advised on the construction of the Belgian State Railway, of which the Brussels-Malines section, opened in 1835, was the first all-steam railway on the European continent. In England, proposals to link the L \& MR with the Midlands had culminated in an Act of Parliament for the Grand Junction Railway in 1833: this was to run from Warrington, which was already linked to the L \& MR, to Birmingham. George Stephenson had been in charge of the surveys, and for the railway's construction he and J.U. Rastrick were initially Principal Engineers, with Stephenson's former pupil Joseph Locke under them; by 1835 both Stephenson and Rastrick had withdrawn and Locke was Engineer-in-Chief. Stephenson remained much in demand elsewhere: he was particularly associated with the construction of the North Midland Railway (Derby to Leeds) and related lines. He was active in many other places and carried out, for instance, preliminary surveys for the Chester \& Holyhead and Newcastle \& Berwick Railways, which were important links in the lines of communication between London and, respectively, Dublin and Edinburgh.

He eventually retired to Tapton House, Chesterfield, overlooking the North Midland. A man who was self-made (with great success) against colossal odds, he was ever reluctant, regrettably, to give others their due credit, although in retirement, immensely wealthy and full of honour, he was still able to mingle with people of all ranks.

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