A room full of Royal Society elites in tailored coats faced a coal miner with a thick Northumberland accent who couldn't read his own name until age 18, and practically accused him of fraud, because they could not fathom that an unlettered pit worker had invented a device that would save thousands of miners' lives. George Stephenson would go on to do far more than embarrass the establishment: he built the railways that became the circulatory system of the Industrial Revolution.

This episode follows the barefoot boy who paid for night school out of a miner's wage, the grief-filled twenties that forged his obsession with machines, and the safety lamp he tested by holding prototypes against hissing gas fissures while the famous Humphry Davy worked the same problem in London. It covers Rocket, the Rainhill trials, the bog he conquered, the cucu ...