Private Risk, Public Benefit
For George Stephenson, the motto of the Stockton and Darlington Railway was a code to live by.
1832
King William IV 1830-1837
For George Stephenson, the motto of the Stockton and Darlington Railway was a code to live by.
1832
King William IV 1830-1837
However pure Science may be, a scientist’s head may be turned by ambition, politics or gain, resulting in great harm to social and economic progress. Happily, George Stephenson was not such a man, as Michael Longridge of Bedlington Iron Works testified in a letter (here abridged) to Edinburgh engineer George Buchanan in January 1832.
abridged
Bedlington Iron Works, Jan. 16th, 1832.
DEAR Sir,
I cannot better reply to your letter of the 12th instant, than by giving you a short account of the reasons which induced me to attempt the substitution of wrought iron in the place of cast iron Railway bars.*
In the year 1818, an offer was made to me for supplying these works with coals at a reduced price, provided the Bedlington Iron Company would lay a Railway from the colliery. I was so convinced of the superiority of malleable [i.e. wrought]* iron over cast iron, as the material of which a Railway bar ought to be made, that I resolved upon laying down malleable iron Railway bars upon the road which the Bedlington Iron Company intended to make.
Several minor improvements have since been made, and I send you herewith a drawing of a rail, which we are now making for the Stockton and Darlington Railway: you will observe that the bars are fastened to the chairs or pedestals by iron wedges instead of nails, which has been found to be a considerable improvement.
* Cast iron had many admirers and more importantly many investors, but cast iron bars are more brittle than wrought or malleable iron, and from the start heavy steam locomotives did great damage to cast iron rails: see The First Train Journey by Steam. The decision to use wrought iron rails at Bedlington and later on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world’s first public line, was therefore of incalculable importance for our economic and social progress at a critical period.
* The terms wrought iron and malleable iron are used interchangeably here. Wrought is an archaic past-tense form of work and refers to metal that has been worked when hot, e.g. shaped with a hammer in a blacksmith’s forge, or rolled in a steel mill.