Short answers, pulled from the story.
Richard Trevithick invented the first high-pressure steam engine and built the first working railway steam locomotive. He also developed safety innovations for steam boilers, including a fusible lead plug, adjustable safety valves, and the use of a mercury manometer to measure pressure.
On the 21st of February 1804, Trevithick's steam locomotive hauled ten tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy men along the Merthyr Tramroad from Penydarren to Abercynon, a distance of 9.75 miles. The journey took four hours and five minutes at an average speed of approximately 2.4 miles per hour.
Richard Trevithick was born on the 13th of April 1771 at Tregajorran, in the parish of Illogan, Cornwall. He died on the 22nd of April 1833 at The Bull hotel in Dartford, Kent, from pneumonia, and was buried in an unmarked grave at St Edmund's Burial Ground.
The Puffing Devil was a full-size steam road locomotive Trevithick built in 1801 near Fore Street in Camborne, Cornwall. On Christmas Eve 1801, it successfully carried six passengers up Fore Street and Camborne Hill, making it among the earliest demonstrations of a self-propelled steam vehicle carrying passengers.
Trevithick travelled to Peru to help drain the silver mines at Cerro de Pasco, located at 4,330 metres altitude. Boulton and Watt's low-pressure engines were useless at that elevation, but Trevithick's high-pressure engines worked satisfactorily. He left Penzance on the 20th of October 1816 aboard the whaler Asp.
Trevithick is commemorated by a statue in Camborne unveiled in 1932 by Prince George, Duke of Kent, and by a Blue Plaque at the Royal Victoria and Bull hotel in Dartford unveiled in 2007. A working reconstruction of the Pen-y-darren locomotive, commissioned in 1981, runs several times a year at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea.