Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/195

 Plains of Heaven,’ after John Morton; ‘The Highland Whiskey Still,’ the ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ and ‘The Queen at Osborne,’ after Landseer; ‘Ophelia,’ after Millais; and the ‘Portrait of Lord Tennyson,’ after George Frederick Watts. He also engraved pictures by Maclise, Gilbert Stuart Newton, Thomas Faed, and Sir John Watson Gordon. Stephenson died at his residence in Dartmouth Park Road, London, on 28 May 1886. Among his contemporaries he was regarded as one of the finest line engravers in the country, and in vignette engraving he was probably unsurpassed.

[Manchester Guardian, 4 June 1886; Times, 5 June 1886; Athenæum, 1886, i. 787; Bryan's Dict. of Engravers, supplement.]

 STEPHENSON, ROBERT (1803–1859), civil engineer, only son of George Stephenson [q. v.], was born at Willington Quay, near Newcastle, on 16 Oct. (not November) 1803 (cf. Register). The following year his father removed to Killingworth, where on 14 May 1806 his mother died of consumption. His first elements of education were acquired in the village school of Long Benton. In 1814 his father, whose circumstances were now improving, and who felt keenly his own want of a sound education, sent him to Bruce's academy at Newcastle, and made him a member of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Leaving school in 1819, he was apprenticed to Nicholas Wood (M.I.C.E.), viewer of Killingworth colliery. In 1821 he assisted his father in the survey of Stockton and Darlington Railway, and then in 1822 spent six months studying at Edinburgh University. There he met, as a fellow student, his lifelong friend, George Parker Bidder [q. v.], with whom he afterwards carried on much of his professional work. On leaving the university he settled down in Newcastle to manage the locomotive factory which his father established there in 1823, but his health soon broke down, and he accepted an offer to go abroad to Columbia in South America to superintend the working of some gold and silver mines. He left England in June 1824, and was absent three years. Difficulties in the working of the locomotive factory led to a request for him to return; on the return journey he met Richard Trevithick [q. v.], then on his way back to England, a penniless, broken man. Stephenson reached England in 1827, in the thick of the controversy as to the most suitable system of traction for use on the Liverpool and Manchester line. The famous Rocket was eventually built under his direction at the Newcastle works, the securing of the tubes in their plates giving him great trouble before the difficulty was overcome. Most of the subsequent improvements in the details of the locomotive were due to his skill. From 1827 to 1833 besides this work he assisted his father generally in the Liverpool and Manchester line, in the Leicester and Swannington line, and in other minor lines.

In 1833 the act for the London and Birmingham line was passed; Stephenson became engineer, and was solely responsible for its success. The work is a memorable one, not only from the great difficulties encountered in its construction—as, for example, in the Blisworth cutting and in the long Kilsby tunnel—but also because it was the first railway into London. It was completed in 1838. He took an active part in the great ‘battle of the gauges’ which was fought out in parliament, and also in the great struggle between the rival advocates of the locomotive and of the atmospheric system, in both contests supporting with all the strength of his powerful and clear intellect the causes which the judgment of experience has shown to be the right ones. From 1838 till the close of his life he was engaged on railway work, not only in Great Britain, but all over the world; railways were constructed either under his own direct supervision or under his advice which have since become the trunk lines of the countries in which they were laid down.

The greatest works he carried out, or at any rate those by which he will be best known to posterity, were his bridges. The splendid high-level bridge over the Tyne at Newcastle and the Victoria bridge at Berwick were two of his earliest and most successful examples of this branch of engineering. When the act was passed in 1844 for the Chester and Holyhead line, Stephenson gave long and anxious consideration to the best type of bridge for crossing the Conway and the Menai Straits. Eventually he decided upon the tubular girder form, the type of railway bridge which will always remain inseparably connected with his name. Assisted by Hodgkinson, Fairbairn, and Clarke, his schemes were carefully worked out, every step being tested by experiment, and his labours were eventually crowned with success when the Menai bridge was opened for traffic on 5 March 1850. He constructed on similar lines the great Victoria bridge over the St. Lawrence at Montreal, which was begun in 1854 and completed in 1859, and was for many years the longest bridge in the world, and also two others in Egypt. For his invention of