Richard Trevithick

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Trevithick died on the 22nd of April 1833 in a hotel room in Dartford, Kent, penniless and alone. No relatives or friends had come to his bedside during his final illness. The workers at a nearby engineering firm passed a collection among themselves to cover his funeral costs and served as his pallbearers. They also hired a night watchman to stand guard over his fresh grave, because body snatching was common in those years. The man they were protecting had, just three decades earlier, changed the world.

  Trevithick was a Cornish inventor and mining engineer who built the first high-pressure steam engine and the first working railway locomotive. On the 21st of February 1804, his unnamed steam locomotive hauled ten tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy men along a Welsh tramway in a single journey. The railway age that would reshape every continent began on that morning in Merthyr Tydfil. Yet the man who started it died in an unmarked grave, his name almost entirely forgotten. How did that happen?

• 2. The Boy from Cornwall

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  Tregajorran, a settlement in the parish of Illogan between Camborne and Redruth, was where Richard Trevithick was born on the 13th of April 1771. The land around it was riddled with tin and copper mines, and his father, also named Richard Trevithick, was a mine captain. Growing up, the young Trevithick watched steam engines drawing water out of the deep shafts as a matter of daily routine.

  He was an unusual child in several ways. At 6 feet 2 inches tall, he towered over his contemporaries at a time when that height was rare. He was athletic and devoted his energy to sport rather than schoolwork; one of his teachers called him "a disobedient, slow, obstinate, spoiled boy, frequently absent and very inattentive". The one subject that caught his attention was arithmetic, though he characteristically arrived at correct answers by unconventional methods.

  For a time during his childhood, one of his neighbours in Redruth was William Murdoch, the steam carriage pioneer. Murdoch had developed and demonstrated a model steam carriage in 1784, and at Trevithick's own request, Murdoch demonstrated it to him in 1794. That proximity and that demonstration almost certainly shaped what came next. Trevithick went to work for the first time at nineteen, at the East Stray Park Mine, where the miners respected him partly because of his father's name.

• 3. The War Over Steam Pressure

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  James Watt and his business partner Matthew Boulton held a patent that dominated the steam engine industry of the era. The key element was the "separate condenser patent", which Watt himself considered the most contentious of his holdings. Every mine operator in Britain who wanted a steam pump had to pay royalties to Boulton and Watt. Trevithick, who became engineer at the Ding Dong Mine in 1797, set himself against that arrangement from the start.

  Working alongside Edward Bull, Trevithick began experimenting with high-pressure steam as a way around Watt's patents. His insight was straightforward: if the steam itself could push a piston with enough force, you did not need a condenser at all. Watt and Boulton disagreed, enforced an injunction at Ding Dong, and posted it on the Count House door. That building is now a ruin, the only surviving structure from Trevithick's time at the mine.

  Trevithick's son Francis would later state that his father made high-pressure steam work in England in 1799, though some sources place his first high-pressure engine as early as 1797. The technical benefit was stark: no condenser meant a smaller cylinder, which meant a lighter and more compact machine. Trevithick recognised that if the engine were light enough, it could carry its own weight. A locomotive became conceivable. In 1802, he took out a formal patent for his high-pressure engine, and built a demonstration engine at the Coalbrookdale Company's works in Shropshire that ran at forty piston strokes per minute with a boiler pressure of 145 psi.

• 4. Puffing Devil on Christmas Eve

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  On Christmas Eve 1801, a crowd gathered near Fore Street in Camborne to watch Trevithick demonstrate a full-size steam road locomotive he had built on a nearby site. He called it the Puffing Devil. His cousin Andrew Vivian steered the machine while Trevithick operated it, carrying six passengers up Fore Street and continuing on up Camborne Hill to the village of Beacon. The journey was short but it had never been done before, and it inspired a Cornish folk song, "Camborne Hill", that is still sung today.

  Three days later, the engine broke down after crossing a gully. The crew left it under shelter with the fire still burning while they went to eat roast goose and drink at a nearby public house. The boiler ran dry, overheated, and destroyed itself in a fire. Trevithick attributed the accident to operator error, not a design flaw.

  He built a second road vehicle in 1803, the London Steam Carriage, and drove it through London from Holborn to Paddington and back. Observers and journalists took notice. The ride was uncomfortable and cost more to operate than a horse-drawn carriage, so it was abandoned. Also in 1803, one of his stationary pumping engines at Greenwich exploded, killing four men. Watt and Boulton seized on the accident as evidence of the dangers of high-pressure steam. Trevithick's response was methodical: he added two safety valves, a fusible lead plug that would melt and release steam if the water level dropped too low, and introduced both hydraulic testing of boilers and the use of a mercury manometer to measure pressure.

• 5. The 21st of February 1804

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  Samuel Homfray, proprietor of the Penydarren Ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil, was sufficiently impressed with Trevithick's locomotive work that in 1803 he bought the patents outright. He then made a wager: 500 guineas staked against another ironmaster, Richard Crawshay, that the locomotive could haul ten tons of iron the 9.75 miles from Penydarren to Abercynon along the Merthyr Tramroad.

  On the 21st of February 1804, in front of a large public gathering that included Homfray, Crawshay, a Mr. Giddy described as a respected patron, and a government engineer who was almost certainly a boiler safety inspector, the locomotive completed the journey. It carried ten tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy passengers the full distance in four hours and five minutes, averaging approximately 2.4 miles per hour.

  The locomotive's design was specific to this task. A single cylinder with a very long stroke was mounted partly inside the boiler. A large flywheel on one side absorbed the uneven power pulses and transmitted motion to a central cogwheel connected to the driving wheels. Exhaust steam was routed up the chimney, which drew air through the fire and increased efficiency. The run proved that a steam locomotive could haul heavy loads on a smooth iron road using only the adhesive weight of its own mass against the rails. The tramroad's cast iron plates, however, were designed for horse-drawn wagons and broke under the locomotive's weight. After the demonstration, the engine was placed back on blocks and returned to driving hammers.

• 6. Tunnels, Ships, and Bankruptcy

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  Robert Vazie, a fellow Cornish engineer, had been hired in 1805 to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames at Rotherhithe and had already run into severe water problems by the time Trevithick was called in. The directors of the Thames Archway Company offered him £1000 to complete the remaining 1,220 feet. Trevithick began driving a pilot tunnel 5 feet high and roughly 3 feet wide in August 1807. By the 23rd of December it had advanced 950 feet before a sudden water inrush halted work. A month later, on the 26th of January 1808, at the 1,040-foot mark, a far worse inrush flooded the tunnel entirely. Trevithick was the last person to leave and nearly drowned. Clay was packed onto the riverbed to seal the breach; after that, some directors tried to discredit him, though two colliery engineers from the north of England ultimately upheld the quality of his work. The project was abandoned.

  In 1808 Trevithick entered a partnership with Robert Dickinson, a West India merchant, and turned his attention to nautical inventions. One patent covered a steam tug with a floating crane; it failed to meet dock fire regulations, and members of the Society of Coal Whippers, fearing for their jobs, threatened Trevithick's life. Another patent introduced iron cargo tanks for ships, replacing wooden casks. A small works at Limehouse employed three men to manufacture them. The tanks could also be used to raise sunken vessels by pumping them full of air. In 1810 a wreck near Margate was lifted this way, but a payment dispute ended with Trevithick cutting the lashings and letting the wreck sink again.

  In May 1810 he contracted typhoid and nearly died. By February 1811, both he and Dickinson had been declared bankrupt. They were not discharged until 1814, with Trevithick paying the bulk of the partnership debts from his own money.

• 7. Peru, Near Death, and a Chance Meeting

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  Francisco Uville was the man responsible for draining the silver mines at Cerro de Pasco in Peru, located at an altitude of 4,330 metres. The Boulton and Watt condensing engines he had were nearly useless at that elevation and could not be broken into pieces small enough to carry up mule tracks. He came to England, bought one of Trevithick's high-pressure engines for 20 guineas, and found it worked satisfactorily. When Uville returned to England in 1813 to recruit further help, a bout of illness diverted him through Jamaica, and by chance he boarded the Falmouth packet ship named Fox with one of Trevithick's cousins aboard. That coincidence brought the two men face to face, and Trevithick agreed to travel to Peru.

  He left Penzance on the 20th of October 1816 on the whaler Asp, accompanied by a lawyer named Page and a boilermaker. The venture turned sour quickly: Trevithick fell out with Uville over accusations he found intolerable and left. He travelled Peru as a mining consultant, served for a time in Simon Bolivar's army, and held mining rights at Caxatambo where he operated a copper and silver mine. The Spanish army and the war of liberation eventually forced him to abandon the area, leaving behind £5,000 worth of ore ready to ship. Uville died in 1818.

  Travelling through Ecuador toward Colombia, Trevithick arrived in Costa Rica in 1822. A crossing of the isthmus on foot with Scottish mining projector James Gerard proved nearly fatal twice: once when Gerard pulled him from a river, and once when he narrowly escaped an alligator following a confrontation with a local man. At Cartagena, he encountered Robert Stephenson, who was returning from a failed three-year mining venture in Colombia. The witnesses to their meeting noted that the two men had little in common, though Stephenson gave Trevithick £50 to help cover his passage home. Trevithick arrived back in Falmouth in October 1827 with almost no possessions beyond his clothes.

• 8. Forgotten and Then Remembered

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  The final years in Dartford brought a small measure of useful work. John Hall, founder of J & E Hall Limited, invited Trevithick to develop a reaction turbine for a new vessel, work that earned him £1,200 and that he lodged at The Bull hotel in Dartford's High Street to complete. That same period produced one more unbuilt proposal: a cast iron column 1,000 feet high, 100 feet wide at the base, tapering to 12 feet at the top, where a horse statue would have stood. It would have weighed 6,000 long tons and required 1,500 prefabricated cast iron pieces. The public showed real interest. It was never constructed.

  After his death at The Bull in 1833, Trevithick was buried in an unmarked grave at St Edmund's Burial Ground in Dartford. The gravestones were cleared away in 1956-57, and only a plaque now marks the approximate site. In Camborne, a statue by Leonard Stanford Merrifield, showing Trevithick holding one of his scale models, was unveiled in 1932 by Prince George, Duke of Kent, before thousands of people. On the 17th of March 2007, Dartford Borough Council unveiled a Blue Plaque at the Royal Victoria and Bull hotel on the site of his death.

  A working reconstruction of the Pen-y-darren locomotive was commissioned in 1981 and delivered to the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum in Cardiff, later moved to the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, where it runs several times a year on a 40-metre length of track. In Merthyr Tydfil, a memorial on Penydarren Road marks the spot where the locomotive crossed on that February morning in 1804. The inscription calls him the builder of the first steam locomotive to run on rails. That fact was not seriously in dispute even in his own lifetime; what his own era failed to supply was the recognition.