George Stephenson

George Stephenson was an English engineer known as the father of railways for his pioneering work on steam locomotives and rail infrastructure during the early Industrial Revolution. In 1814 he built his first locomotive, Blucher, capable of hauling 30 tons of coal up a hill at four miles an hour, and in 1825 his locomotive Locomotion hauled an 80-ton load nine miles on the newly opened Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives. He went on to engineer the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830 as the first inter-city line built specifically for locomotive traffic, overcoming the notoriously unstable Chat Moss bog along the route. The standard rail gauge of four feet eight and a half inches that he adopted became the most widely used gauge in the world, and he served as the first president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers from 1847 until his death the following year.