Now! Then! Joseph Locke, who made the railways pay, is born under indifferent auspices at Attercliffe (Sheffield)

9 August 1805: Joseph Locke, who made the railways pay, is born under indifferent auspices at Attercliffe (Sheffield)

The west portal of Woodhead Tunnel on Joseph Locke’s Manchester-Sheffield (Woodhead) line in 1953, showing the two Victorian single-track tunnels and construction work on the double-track replacement, now also closed (Brooksbank 1953).

Joseph Devey. 1862. The Life of Joseph Locke, Civil Engineer. London: Richard Bentley. Get it:

Excerpt

As our relations with great men are no longer mythological but positive, we are unable to relate that any portents attended Joseph Locke’s birth or played about his cradle. And just as in later life, though he constructed works vaster and far and far more important than the walls of Thebes, we shall not be able to boast that he constructed them by the simple but somewhat supernatural process of breathing through a reed, so we cannot honestly assert that he was the offspring of a sunbeam or the foster-boy of a wolf. And though carrying a railway over Shap Fell, Cumbria, was, perhaps, as serious an undertaking as digging the trenches of Rome, Attercliffe Common for all that was not so marvellous a place as the mountains of Puglia. But desisting from all competition with such more fortunate biographers, we shall not find much to detain us long on the threshold of his existence.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

This should probably be dated to Devey’s writing. Is “the offspring of a sunbeam” Phaethon, son of Helios? I haven’t read further, but Devey makes a convincing case for Locke’s project management skills being the reason why he was preferred to George Stephenson.

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Original

As our relations with great men are no longer mythological but positive, we are unable to relate that any portents attended Joseph Locke’s birth or played about his cradle. And just as in later life, though he constructed works vaster far and far more important than the walls of Thebes, we shall not be able to boast that he constructed them by the simple but somewhat supernatural process of breathing through a reed, so we cannot honestly assert that he was the offspring of a sunbeam or the foster-boy of a wolf. And though carrying a railway over Shap Fell was, perhaps, as serious an undertaking as digging the trenches of Rome, Attercliffe Common for all that was not so marvellous a place as the mountains of Apulia. But desisting from all competition with such more fortunate biographers, we shall not find much to detain us long on the threshold of his existence.

156 words.