To decide the matter, the directors had offered the prize which brought together the _Novelty_, the _Sans-pareil_, the _Rocket_, and the _Perseverance_, engines which would look almost as strange to a modern crowd as they did to the thousands of spectators drawn up along the track on that momentous morning. The contest was soon decided. The _Novelty_, an ingenious engine but not substantially built, broke down twice. The _Sans-pareil_ proved wasteful of coal and also met with an accident. The _Perseverance_, for all its efforts, could do no better than five or six miles an hour. The _Rocket_ alone met all requirements. In a {5} seventy-mile run it averaged fifteen miles an hour and reached a maximum of twenty-nine. Years afterwards, when scrapped to a colliery, the veteran engine was still able, in an emergency, to make four miles in four and a half minutes. 'Truly,' declared Cropper, one of the directors who had stood out for the stationary engine and the miles of rope, 'now has George Stephenson at last delivered himself.' Stephenson had the good fortune, he had earned it indeed, to put the top brick on the wall, and he alone lives in popular memory. But the railway, like most other great inventions, came about by the toil of hundreds of known and unknown workers, each adding his little or great advance, until at last some genius or some plodder, standing on their failures, could reach success. Both the characteristic features of the modern railway, the iron road and the steam motive power, developed gradually as necessity urged and groping experiment permitted.