The Rocket Men
George & Robert Stephenson - The men who reshaped the world
In 2013, a team of archaeologists hunting for Roman remains in a derelict Tyneside shipyard stumbled across the remains of one of the world’s first 'modern' railways.
Buried beneath the surface lay the immaculately-preserved remains of a wooden-railed waggonway, built to 4ft 8in gauge - broadly the same as most of the world’s railways today.
It was on such a railway that George Stephenson - hailed as the greatest of the early steam engine pioneers - ran his first locomotive, Blucher, in 1814.
Marking the 2014 bicentenary of Stephenson’s first locomotive, this new biography looks in detail at the son of an illiterate colliery hand who used his first wages to educate himself at evening school - and coming from nowhere, went on reshape the globe through steam railways.
It is also the story of his son Robert, who went on to become a greater engineer than his father, designing railways, locomotives and ground-breaking bridges across the world.
George not only oversaw the construction of the world’s first purpose-designed steam railway, the Hetton Railway in County Durham, which became the cradle of the railways, but the world’s first public steam railway, the Stockton & Darlington, and the world’s first inter-city line, the Liverpool and Manchester.
He is best known for his locomotive Rocket, which marked the engineering watershed between the early steam locomotives and the modern types which followed in the wake of its innovations. However, modern historians gives equal credit to his son Robert for its design and building - hence the title The Rocket Men.
Father and son went on to design and engineer many other railways, laying the foundations for today’s national railway network. They also introduced the steam locomotive to many other counties: Germany’s first steam engine was supplied by Robert Stephenson.
Thanks to the Stephensons, railways developed from little local coal-carrying affairs into a public rapid transit network which shrunk Britain and then the world.
This new book throws fresh light on these two founders of the modern world, looking at their legendary exploits through fresh material, in time for the 200th anniversary of George Stephenson’s first steam engine, which came 15 years before Rocket. |
Book Details
Paperback: 132 pages
Publisher: Mortons Media Group Ltd.
Language: English
RRP: £6.99
Author: Robin Jones |