George Stephenson

He was born in the pit village of Wylam near Newcastle in 1781 and started work at eight, keeping the cows off the colliery's horse-drawn wagon way. He never went to school and by ten he was working full-time in the pit.
He showed a natural gift for mending and inventing machines and slowly rose to become the colliery's resident engineer. He also showed natural gifts for fighting - willing to wrestle any brawny pitman who dared to cross him, and to argue his case in his broad Northumberland dialect with any member of the local aristocracy or professional engineering fraternity who dared to doubt his worth.
Sir Humphrey Davy, later President of the Royal Society, considered that Stephenson, then an unknown pitman, was 'a thief, and not a clever thief'.
This early battle was one of the many Stephenson waged against the establishment. Stephenson went on to build the world's first public railways: the Stockton and Darlington in 1825 and the Liverpool-Manchester in 1830.
He also played a vital part in the birth of Railway Mania and in the rise of the notorious George Hudson, the Railway King, who began as a draper's assistant and built a railway empire worth thirty million.
Stephenson helped to change the face of civilisation by pioneering railways. He was a great Victorian, yet very little was written about him between Samuel Smile's classic biography in 1857 and Hunter Davies' book 'George Stephenson' written in 1975.
Davies visited the scenes of Stephenson's boyhood and days of fame, produced much original research and created a memorable human portrait not only of a great Victorian but of an original and remarkable man.