As early as 1550 roads employing wooden rails called wagon-ways were commonly used in Germany. Horse-drawn wagons or carts traveled more easily on these pathways than on the dirt roads of the era. By the mid 1770s iron rails and wheels had replaced the wooden ones. In 1789 wagons with flanged or grooved wheels had appeared and provided greater traction on the rails. These developments, along with the invention and improvements of the steam engine throughout the latter half of the 18th century, provided a marriage of opportunity that Richard Trevithick would seize upon to create the first steam powered railroad locomotive.
Richard Trevithick was the son of a Cornwall mine manager. As a youngster, he proved to be more interested in leisure pursuits than schoolwork. He grew to be more than six feet tall, was alleged to be an outstanding wrestler, and possessed enough strength to hurl sledgehammers over the roofs of engine houses. After completing his basic education, he went to work for his father at the Wheal Treasury mine and demonstrated a keen insight regarding engineering principles. He became fascinated with steam power and made several improvements to mine engines. Trevithick believed that the application of high-pressure steam offered tremendous possibilities in the mining industry, particularly in the area of raising ore and refuse from mines. He soon developed such an engine that became greatly sought after in Cornwall and South Wales. In the space of two years he constructed thirty engines, each small enough to fit into an ordinary farm wagon for transport to the mines.
Trevithick realized that an impediment to his innovation was the strict hold that the Watt-Boulton team had on patent approvals on any apparatus that had a steam engine application. He sought ways to circumvent the Watt-Boulton patent by arguing that his high-pressure engine was a distinctive departure from his rivals’ low-pressure engines. This success with a stationary engine led him to the idea of a steam locomotive. By 1796 he had produced a miniature operable one by putting the boiler and the engine in one piece. Hot water was placed in the boiler and a red-hot iron was inserted into a tube below. Thus, the heated water forced steam to rise and start the engine’s operation. Steam from the cylinders was expelled to the atmosphere, eliminating the need for a condenser and producing more power than the much larger Newcomen or Watt-Boulton engines. As the latter’s patents began to expire, Trevithick was in position to take advantage of the nation’s insatiable demand for steam power.
Trevithick shifted his interest to create a larger version for transportation purposes. On Christmas Eve 1801 he unveiled his fourwheeled steam road carriage and drove seven friends on a short jaunt in Cornwall. His locomotive comprised a cylindrical horizontal boiler with a single horizontal cylinder let into it. The piston, propelled back and forth in the cylinder by the pressure of the steam, was linked by a piston rod and connecting rod to a crankshaft bearing a large flywheel. As the engine had no condensers and dispensed steam into the air with much noise, he called the device the Puffing Devil. This version was only capable of going short distances because it was plagued by inefficient steam production. Nonetheless, his initial success led him to take out patents for locomotive types of the engine in 1802.
Thus encouraged, Trevithick traveled to London to meet with several potential investors and scientists. He discovered that Watt had toyed with the idea of high-pressure steam for a locomotive but had abandoned the pursuit out of fear that it posed significant safety risks and would be prone to explosions. In 1803 a company agreed to finance his experiments, and Trevithick demonstrated his locomotive in London. Unfortunately, the engine failed to pull a carriage on several occasions, and he lost backing for the project. Trevithick then obtained financial support from Samuel Homfray, owner of the South Wales Penydarren IronWorks, in Merthyr Tydfil. Homfray bet 1,000 guineas with Richard Crawshay, owner of the Cyfarthfa Ironworks, that he would have a steam engine haul ten tons of iron from his works along the Methyr Tramway to Navigation House, Abercynon. The bet was accepted and local interest heated up as Trevithick readied his engine.
In early 1804 Trevithick’s device with its single vertical cylinder, eight-foot flywheel, and long piston rod was ready. On February 14th people came from far and near to witness the challenge. Five trams of iron and seventy men constituted the load. Almost immediately after departure a near disaster occurred, as the locomotive’s chimney struck a low bridge and each was destroyed. According to the conditions of the bet, Trevithick had to control his locomotive and make any needed repairs without assistance.
He hurriedly cleared the debris from the tracks, repaired his chimney, and then barreled down the tramway on the nine-mile journey at five miles per hour. He reached Abercynon without further incident. However, his locomotive, even without a load, could not make the return trip because of the steep gradients and sharp curves. Furthermore, his Penydarren locomotive only made three total trips. Each time the weight of the engine broke the cast iron rails. Homfray became discouraged, and consequently he pulled his support because he believed that the engine would not reduce his transportation costs. Nonetheless, Trevithick had proven that steam locomotives were a viable possibility.
After several problems with other investors, Trevithick returned to Cornwall and constructed a new locomotive called Catch Me Who Can. He built a circular tramway and in the summer of 1808 charged people one shilling apiece to take a ride at twelve miles per hour on his locomotive at Euston Square in London. Unfortunately, he faced the familiar problem of the breakage of the rails and he once again had to abandon his dream. With no source of income, Trevithick worked for a company who hired him to develop a steam-powered dredger to lift waste from the bottom of the Thames River. He was paid only sixpence for every ton of waste that he raised. Thus, in 1816 he left Britain and went to work as an engineer for a silver mine in Peru. For a Decade, his steam engines proved successful, and the Peruvian government eventually awarded him mining rights. With his profits he acquired a copper and silver mine of his own.
Yet, fate intervened once again. In 1826 civil war erupted in Peru and he was called up to join Simon Bolivar’s army. Instead he abandoned his investments and fled to Costa Rica and then Colombia, where he came across Robert Stephenson, son of George Stephenson. Robert Stephenson was supervising construction of a railroad in Colombia and remembered that Trevithick had met him as a small boy many years earlier. Stephenson paid the destitute Trevithick’s fifty-pound passage back to England.
Once home in Cornwall, Trevithick’s fortunes only soured further. In 1828 the House of Commons rejected a petition to grant Trevithick a pension, despite the fact that George Stephenson and other inventors stated that his work was key to the coming of the railroads. Nonetheless, Trevithick continued to have fresh ideas such as a new propulsion system for steamboats, an improved marine boiler, a recoil gun carriage, a device to provide heat for apartments, and a massive iron column to honor the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. None of these plans gained financial backing, and Richard Trevithick died penniless in April 1833. No funds existed to bury him. Trevithick might have been buried as a pauper but a group of local factory workers in Cornwall stepped in and raised money to provide him with an honorable church funeral.
George Stephenson and others inherited the work done by Richard Trevithick concerning the development of the early railroad locomotive and acknowledged that he was the first to demonstrate successfully the application of high-pressure steam for the purpose of transportation on land. He also proved that his engine could have sufficient traction on iron rails, albeit initially on a normal gradient and even though weight of the engine presented problems with rail breakage. His other contributions in this area were the return flue boiler, the use of the steam jet in the chimney, and the coupling of the wheels of the engine. On the other hand, he also faced threats of competing patent claims, so often the curse of the early inventors in the Industrial Revolution. He once remarked that he had been disparaged by James Watt because he advocated the use of high-powered steam.
Richard Trevithick left few written details of his work other than patent applications and several letters. Yet he slowly gained a wider recognition of his accomplishments. The contemporary encyclopedist Abram Ries highlighted Trevithick with two pages of coverage in his Cyclopedia published in several volumes between 1810 and 1824. Robert Stuart penned a description and made a detailed engraving of Trevithick’s locomotive in 1824. In March 1868 The Engineering Magazine lauded Trevithick as the mastermind behind the locomotive. That accolade was followed by a biography of the inventor published by his son Francis in 1872. Additional honors and recognition followed beginning in the 20th century. In 1934 a monument was dedicated to Richard Trevithick on the site of the famous 1804 tram way run that set the stage for future locomotive developments. It is constructed of stones and rails taken from the site of the old tram road. A second plaque in his honor is located at the Navigation House Hotel in Abercy-non. In 1935 The Trevithick Society For the Preservation and Study of Cornwall’s Industrial Heritage was established. The Society sponsored a 2001 recreation of Trevithick’s Christmas Eve 1801 ‘‘Puffing Devil’’ run. Finally, in 2004 the Royal Mint cast a special coin that commemorated the 200th anniversary of Trevithick’s Penydarren locomotive nine-mile journey from Merthyr to Navigation House. Despite this adulation, Richard Trevithick remains the all-but-forgotten early significant contributor to the birth of the railroad era. Despite the fact that his life ended in poverty, Trevithick himself did not seem to have regrets regarding his pursuits, as he once remarked that his life had been honored by being a useful citizen, an accomplishment that could be equaled by no sum of money.
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