THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE 



school, learned his alphabet, was able to scrawl his 

 name at eighteen years of age, and a little later could 

 read, write, and do sums in arithmetic. 



But if deficient in letters, there was one field in which 

 he had no superior, — that was in the practical hand- 

 ling of a steam-engine. His position in the mine gave 

 him a chance to study the workings of the engines then 

 in use, and at every opportunity, on holidays and after 

 working-hours, he was in the habit of dismantling his 

 engine, and carefully studying every detail of its con- 

 struction. Thus by the time he had reached his ma- 

 jority he was a skillful engineer, besides having many 

 new ideas that had developed during his examinations 

 of the machinery. But besides his knowledge of en- 

 gineering, he was an accomplished workman in other 

 fields. He was a good shoemaker, watch- and clock- 

 repairer, and tailors' cutter, at all of which trades he 

 worked at odd times to increase his income. Thus he 

 was a veritable jack-of -all-trades ; with the unusual 

 qualification, that he was master of one. 



By the time he was twenty-six years old he was hold- 

 ing the position of engineer to a coal-mining company, 

 and had acquired the confidence of his employers to 

 such an extent that he was permitted to build a loco- 

 motive for them — a thing that had been his ambition 

 for several years. This was in 1807, the same year 

 that Robert Fulton demonstrated the possibilities of 

 steam navigation. 



In the construction of this engine Stephenson intro- 

 duced several novel features of his own inventing, al- 

 though on the whole no new principles were involved; 



[125] 



