His desire to provide his motherless
boy Robert with better schooling than he had enjoyed sharpened
his wits and added strength to his arm. Fortunately the son
proved to be not only an apt scholar, but had the rare gift of
being able to teach others. Whatever he learned in the good
schools to which his father sent him, he imparted to his father.
So boy and man progressed together in their educational
partnership.
When George Stephenson became chief enginewright of the
Killingworth collieries at one hundred pounds a year he thought
he had reached the summit of his ambition. The duties of the
position made less demand upon him for manual labor, and left him
time to carry out some of his mechanical ideas. He devised new
hoists and pumps for the mines, and then applied himself to the
ever-present problem of cheapening the transportation of the
coals between pit mouth and ship side. One of his first
improvements of this sort was a gravity railway, so arranged that
the loaded cars, running down to the river by their own weight,
furnished the power to draw the empty cars to the summit again by
cable. When George Stephenson took up the problem of
perfecting a "traveling steam engine" he had the advantage of
knowing what had been accomplished by other experimenters.
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