The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer - Lighthouse ...

160 LIFE OF GEOEGE STEPHENSON. [chap. xiV.
and untried thing ; and the Darlington men merely proposed,
by means of their intended road, to provide a more facile mode
of transporting their coals and merchandise to market.
Although the locomotive had been working for years success-
fully at Killingworth, its merits do not seem to have been fairly
estimated, even in the locality itself; and it was still regarded
rather in the light of a mechanical curiosity, than as the vital
force of the railway system.
Thomas Gray, of Nottingham, was a much more sanguine
and speculative man. He was not a mechanic, nor an inventor,
nor a coal-owner, but an enthusiastic believer in the wonderful
powers of the railroad system. Being a native of Leeds, he
had, when a boy, seen Blenkinsop's locomotive at work on the-
Middleton cogged railroad ; and from an early period he seems
to have entertained almost as sanguine views on the subject as
Sir Richard Phillips himself. It would appear that Gray was
residing in Brussels in 1816, when the project of a canal from
Charleroi, for the purpose of connecting Holland with the mining
districts of Belgium, was the subject of discussion ;
and, in con-
versation with Mr. John Cockerill and others, he took the opportunity
of advocating the superior advantages of a railway. For
some years after, he pondered the subject more carefully, and
at length became fully possessed by the grand idea on which
other minds were now at work. He occupied himself for some
time with the preparation of a pamphlet on the subject. He
shut himself up in his room secluded from his wife and relations,
declining to give them any information on the subject of his mys-
terious studies, beyond the assurance that his scheme " would
revolutionize the whole face of the material world, and of so-
ciety."*
* The Railway System and its Autlior, Tliomas Gray, now of Exeter. A
Letter to Sir Robert Peel. By Thomas Wilson. 1845. In this very eloquent
and generous tribute to the memory of his friend, Mr. Wilson has endeavoured
to make it appear that Thomas Gray was the Inventor, originator, creator, and
founder of the Railway Locomotive System, forgetting that railways had been
at work before Mr. Gray was born, and that the locomotive had been invented
while he was yet a boy. The " true founder of the railway system " certainly
was not Thomas Gray, though he wrote a clever and far-seeing treatise about
railways. The true founder of the railway system was the man who invented