It would be a long story, however interesting, to follow the young mechanic through the experiences by which he won a name in all the North Country as the cleverest of "engine doctors," eking out his wages by making lasts, mending watches, and even cutting out coats and trousers for the wives of the pitmen to sew up for their husbands. His desire to provide his motherless boy Robert with better schooling than he had enjoyed sharpened his wits and added strength to his arm. Fortunately the son proved to be not only an apt scholar, but had the rare gift of being able to teach others. Whatever he learned in the good schools to which his father sent him, he imparted to his father. So boy and man progressed together in their educational partnership. When George Stephenson became chief enginewright of the Killingworth collieries at one hundred pounds a year he thought he had reached the summit of his ambition. The duties of the position made less demand upon him for manual labor, and left him time to carry out some of his mechanical ideas. He devised new hoists and pumps for the mines, and then applied himself to the ever-present problem of cheapening the transportation of the coals between pit mouth and ship side. One of his first improvements of this sort was a gravity railway, so arranged that the loaded cars, running down to the river by their own weight, furnished the power to draw the empty cars to the summit again by cable. When George Stephenson took up the problem of perfecting a "traveling steam engine" he had the advantage of knowing what had been accomplished by other experimenters. For fifty years inventors had been turning out steam engines of considerable promise in the model stage, but of little practical performance. Indeed, about 1803, a Cornishman named Trevithick had produced a locomotive which was used for a time to transport metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could walk. The next year a Derbyshire mechanic produced a "Mechanical Traveler," the legs of which were moved alternately by steam, but the bursting of its boiler on its trial trip put an end to its picturesque career of doubtful usefulness. One Mr. Blackett, an enterprising collier of Wylam, introduced the ideas of Trevithick and Blenkinsop to the Tyneside and so brought them under the observant eye of the Killingworth enginewright, who had such a clever way of smoothing away difficulties in complicated machinery. After repeated and costly experiments, Mr. Blackett evolved a type of locomotive which, though noisy and clumsy, did better work than any of its predecessors.