o his dying day. The Geordie lamp
continues in use to the present moment in the Tyneside collieries with
excellent effect.

For some years more, Mr. Stephenson (he is now fairly entitled to that
respectable prefix) went on still further experimenting on the 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 received from his Edinburgh
teachers.

In 1819 George married again, his second wife being the daughter of a
farmer at Black Callerton.

The work which finally secured the position of George Stephenson and of
his dearly loved locomotive was the Stockton and Darlington railway.
Like all the other early railways,