STEPHENSON, ROBERT (1803-1859), English engineer, only son of George Stephenson (q.v.), was born at Willington Quay on Oct. 16, 2803. He spent four years at school in New castle, and was then (1819) apprenticed to Nicholas Wood, a coal-viewer at Killingworth, after which he was sent in 1822 to attend science classes at the university of Edinburgh. He assisted his father in surveying the Stockton and Darlington and Liver pool and Manchester railways, and in 1824 he took charge of the engineering operations in South America of the Colombian Min ing Association of London. He resigned in 1827, and returned to England via New York in company with Richard Trevithick, whom he had met in a penniless condition at Cartagena. Stephenson then undertook the management of his father's factory in New castle, and assisted in the improvement of the locomotive. His work extended to Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland and Egypt. He specialised in the construction of railway bridges,
especially those of the tubular girder type, and among his more notable examples are the Royal Border bridge at Berwick-on Tweed, the High Level bridge at Newcastle-on-Tyne, the Britannia tubular bridge over the Menai Straits, the Conway tubular bridge, and the Victoria tubular bridge over the St. Lawrence at Montreal. In 1847 he entered the House of Com mons as member for Whitby, retaining the seat till his death in London on Oct. 12, 1859. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
See The Story of the Life of George Stephenson, including a Memoir of his Son Robert Stephenson, by Samuel Smiles (1857; new ed. 1880 ; Jeaffreson, Life of Robert Stephenson (2 vols., 1864) ; and Smiles's Lives of the Engineers, vol. v. (1873).