This is an I-Heart podcast.

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today's topic has come up on the show before. He came up recently, very briefly, in our self-help books episode. He also came up in our two-parter on Sir Humphrey Davy. He was one of the people who also invented a minor safety lamp, got involved in a rather heated argument

over who did it first. But he is most well known for his work on locomotives and railways.

He's often called the father of railways. And that is George Stevenson, and we are going to talk about him today.

George Stevenson was born on June 9, 1781, in Wylam, England, which is in the county of Northumberland. His parents, Robert and Mabel Carr-Stevenson, were quite poor. Robert worked as a fireman at the Wylam Colliery. This was one of several jobs working in coal that he had in his life, and that is because

coal pits would be opened up very quickly, mined to exhaustion, and then closed, so people had to

follow the trail of new mine openings to make a living. That meant, consequently, working in coal was a

nomadic life. George was the second of six children, working in coal was a nomadic life.

George was the second of six children, and when he was born, the Stevenson's were living with three other families in a small cottage that was less than two yards from a wooden railway that was used for horse-drawn carts carrying coal from the mines.

And George followed in his father's footsteps.

He did not go to school, and he started working when he was a child of eight.

This was really quite normal for children in coal mining villages.

Neither of George's parents could read or write,

and they also had started working when they were just kids.

George's first job was watching a neighbor's cows and horses and helping in the garden, but he started call your rework not much later. He started out as a picker, meaning he picked things like

metal and slate out of the coal. He then moved on to a job driving one of the horses that pulled mine carts, but eventually

he moved up again and made his way to become his father's assistant.

George grew up around early steam-powered technology, but from the blue-collar side of it.

His father operated a Newcomen atmospheric steam engine at the local colliery.

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