work at his
home evenings and leisure hours, cutting out clothes for the miners,
mending clocks and shoes, and all this time studying mechanics and
engineering with a view to perpetual motion, which a great many others
of his time were studying.

His first opportunity to show his superiority was when an expensive pump
had been put in the colliery, and utterly failed to do the work required
of it. Various experts gave it their best efforts, but it still refused
to do what was required of it. Stephenson was heard to say, by some of
the workmen, that he could repair it. After all others had failed, the
overseer, in despair, with but little expectation that anything could be
accomplished by a raw colliery hand, employed him to attempt a remedy.
He took the engine to pieces and at the end of a few days repaired it
ready for work, and in two days it cleared the pit of water.

For this, and other improvements made upon old machinery, he was
appointed chief engineer in 1813, at Killingworth, at a salary of L100
per year. Besides erecting a winding engine for drawing up coal, and a
pumping-engine, he projected and laid down a self-acting incline along
the declivity of the Willington ballast quay, so arranged that full
wagons descending to the vessels drew up the empty ones. But the
construction of an efficient and economical locomotive steam engine
mainly occupied his mind. He was among those who saw the Blenkinsop
engine first put on the track, and watched its mechanism for some time,
when he concluded he could make a better machine. He found a friend in
his employer, Lord Ravensworth, who furnished the money, and in the
work-shops at West Moor, Killingworth, with the aid of the colliery
blacksmith, he constructed a locomotive which was completed in July,
1814. The affair, though clumsy, worked successfully on the Killingworth
railway, drawing eight loaded carriages, of thirty tons each, at the
rate of four miles an hour. It was the first locomotive made with smooth
wheels, for he rejected the contrivance which Trevithick, Blenkinsop and
others had thought necessary to secure sufficient adhesion between the
wheels and the rails.

While engaged on plans for an improved engine his attention was
attracted to the increase in the draught of the furnace obtained by
turning the waste steam up the chimney, at first practiced solely in the
desire to lessen the noise caused by the escape of the steam. Hence
originated the steam-blast,