ONE Sunday, when the party had just returned from church, they were standing together on the terrace near the Hall, and observed in the distance a railway-train flashing along, tossing behind its long white plume of steam. “Now, Buckland,” said Stephenson, “Can you tell me what is the power that is driving that train?”
“Well,” said the other, “I suppose it is one of your big engines.”
“But what drives the engine?”
“Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver.”*
“What do you say to the light of the sun?”
“How can that be?” asked the doctor.
“It is nothing else,” said the engineer, “it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years, — light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, — and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.”
This was a little joke at Stephenson’s expense, a proud son of Northumberland. (They were actually in Derbyshire, guests of Sir Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister.) In the North East, ‘canny’ doesn’t mean ‘shrewd’ as it does elsewhere; it means ‘likeable, good company’.
Précis
In conversation with William Buckland, the noted geologist, George Stephenson asked what his companion thought was the fuel for steam locomotives. After a little teasing on both sides, Stephenson made the serious point that coal, as carbonized vegetation, is stored-up sunlight, and that trains are effectively solar-powered. (47 / 60 words)