In 1826 a Stockton chemist scraped a dirty stirring stick across a rough hearth and invented the friction match. He sold fire by the tin for a shilling, refused to patent the idea and told [more…]
This is the first article since the railway series went into the sidings, and we are now well overdue an article on the fairer sex. So, this week we bring to you a lady who [more…]
A final journey into history to meet three men whose names never sadly made it into popular memory but who, like all the others, laid the foundations still used by the railways to this day. [more…]
He taught Robert Stephenson his trade, judged the Rainhill Trials, and wrote the first proper book on railways, the one that engineers across the world actually used. Not all of us can be gallivanting around [more…]
You may be surprised to learn that a working time machine has already been invented in County Durham. It exists because one man refused to let the region throw its own history into the skip. [more…]
George Stephenson gets the statues. But a plain-dressing Quaker wool merchant from Darlington put up the money, drove the Act through Parliament, and hired Stephenson in the first place. He helped found the world’s first [more…]
He started working life down a pit age six, ran half the coalfield by his thirties, and built an entire harbour to spite his rivals. They called him the King of the Coal Trade, and [more…]
At 21 he was building the locomotives for Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Then he took Brunel’s Great Eastern and used it to lay the first lasting telegraph cable across the Atlantic. This is the man [more…]
Before George Stephenson’s name ended up on everything, a colliery manager from Newburn settled the one argument that decided whether railways would ever work. He won it with a hand-cranked cart, two iron engines, and [more…]
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