NEW IDEAS AND The SMALL FIRM

It is good to come to Newcastle to talk about new ideas, for here the practice of using new ideas is as old as Newcastle's new castle. It was near here some four centuries ago that some unknown genius created what may have been the first railway in the world to take trucks of coal to the Tyne. It was here that Sir Humphry Davy came in 1817 to receive tribute in gold plate from the mine owners for having designed a safer lamp. It was in this city in 1823 that George Stephenson built his first works for making locomotives. It was also in this city that Swan worked and lived and solved the problem of making the carbon filament lamp. Thus it was in Newcastle that Swan gave the first public exhibition on a large scale of electric lighting by means of incandescent lamps. That was in 1880. It was on the Tyne in 1897 that Sir Charles Parsons built the Turbinia which was literally to make rings round the Grand Fleet.