Richard Trevithick

English engineer

• Born: April 13, 1771
• Birthplace: Illogan, Cornwall, England
• Died: April 22, 1833
• Place of death: Dartford, Kent, England

Trevithick developed the high-pressure steam engine, whose invention lies not merely in its efficiency but in the fact that it made steam engines applicable for many uses. He is remembered as the founder of the locomotive engine, as his engines were used for road and rail locomotives, for powering dredgers and steamships, and in agricultural threshing machines.

Early Life

Richard Trevithick (TREHV-ih-thihk) was born in Cornwall, one of the most remote parts of England, more than 250 miles from London. The Cornish were a fiercely independent group, unrelated racially to the English, and with a language of their own similar to Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton. Although that language had gone out of general use about one hundred years before Trevithick’s birth, there remained heavy remnants of Cornish in the everyday language of the miners among whom he grew up. The countryside of west Cornwall around his birthplace of Illogan is wild and poor. During the 1770’s, there were only two occupations that could sustain a family—fishing and mining—a harsh factor that is immortalized in the county’s coat of arms. Until 1870, Cornwall was the world’s greatest source of copper and tin but subject to frequent periods of boom and depression.

Richard Trevithick was the only son of Richard Trevithick, manager of several mines until his death in 1797. The elder Trevithick was a friend of the preacher John Wesley and himself became a Methodist class leader. The young Trevithick did not enjoy his encounter with formal education at Camborne School. He often played the truant. He was, however, an impressive athlete. At six feet, two inches tall, with prodigious strength, he became one of the most powerful Cornish wrestlers of his day, and stories abound concerning his lifting strength.

In addition, after Trevithick grew up listening to his father, who was a noted pumping engineer; to William Murdock, James Watt’s chief assistant and a resident at Redruth from 1780 to 1799; and to William Bull, the leading exponent of a rival Cornish school of engineers, he developed an inventive genius. As early as 1795, the young Cornishman received payments for improvements he made in steam-engine fuel consumption. By 1797, he was engineer at Ding Dong mine near Penzance. During that same year, Trevithick married Jane Harvey, the daughter of John Harvey, who was the owner of the famous Hayle foundry.

Trevithick was in many respects a most impressive man. With his broad shoulders, great height, massive head, and bright blue eyes, he was imposing indeed. In his ideas and projects, he was courageous and ingenious. By all accounts, he could be fierce but was also tenderhearted, impetuous but too easily discouraged. He constantly worked facing a shortage of capital. Trevithick was essentially an experimenter, not a businessperson, and for this he was to pay dearly.

Life’s Work

Cornish mines were often old and very deep. From the early part of the eighteenth century, steam engines were used to pump out the water collecting in the bottom of the shafts. The old Newcomen engines were modified by Cornish engineers, but the appearance, in 1777, of the new engine developed by Matthew Boulton and James Watt soon made the Cornish among the firm’s first and best customers. There were, however, two problems. The first was that the Watt engine was under patent, which made its purchase expensive. The second was that to power the engine, one needed coal. Cornwall had no coal deposits and thus had to import, again at great expense. By 1800, Cornish engineers were engaged in a bitter fight with Boulton and Watt, evading patent rights with minor improvements and trying to come up with an alternative, more efficient engine of their own.

In this, Trevithick succeeded. He invented a high-pressure steam engine that could pump water at a level of forty to fifty pounds per square inch, in contrast to the five to ten pounds of the Watt engine, and that he later developed to work at 145 pounds per square inch. Naturally, Watt disliked this rival, more efficient development and tried all he could to get a law passed in Parliament banning Trevithick’s engine as a danger to the public. In addition to this large engine for pumping water from the mines, Trevithick, in the same year, designed and built a small steam-winding engine for the Wheal Hope mine to power the transit of miners between surface and mine galleries and to raise ore and refuse. It was known as the “Puffer Whim,” after the noise it made. It was this engine, the first human-made compact and portable source of power, that Trevithick patented in 1802 and that formed the basis of his efforts in road and rail locomotion. By 1804, Trevithick had made and sold fifty such engines.

As early as 1796 and 1798, Trevithick had made models of a steam locomotive. After his invention of the Puffer Whim, he set about designing and building a steam carriage for road use. On Christmas Eve, 1801, at Beacon Hill near Camborne, the first road test was carried out. Trevithick’s steam carriage carried several passengers up the hill at four miles per hour and sped along at eight to nine miles per hour along the flat. It was Great Britain’s earliest self-propelled road vehicle.

During the following month, January, 1802, Trevithick and his cousin Andrew Vivian, who supplied the money, set off for London to exhibit the machine and to solicit interest. Trevithick was interviewed by the president of the Royal Society and the famous scientist Sir Humphry Davy, both Cornishmen, and at least two trips of several miles each were undertaken by the steam carriage around suburban London in heavy traffic. The results were mixed. On the second trip, a pothole momentarily wrested control of the vehicle from its inexperienced driver, and it plowed into a wall. Trevithick suddenly canceled the public exhibitions, upset by the lack of publicity and, no doubt, discouraged by the fact that the roads of Great Britain were so bad that general adoption of his vehicle was impractical.

Not completely daunted, Trevithick took a job at the Pen-y-darran ironworks in South Wales. There, in 1803, he invented a rail locomotive. It later pulled ten tons of iron, seventy men, and five wagons at five miles per hour for nine and a half miles. However, misfortune again prevented Trevithick’s triumph from achieving national recognition. The locomotive and its load proved to be too heavy for the tramway. Many of the tramplates broke under the strain, as did several of the hooks linking the wagons. After a few runs, the owners, not wanting the expense of replacing the track, converted the locomotive into a stationary pump. In 1805, Trevithick applied his engine for use in a dredger in the Thames estuary. By 1808, he designed a lighter, simpler locomotive, the “Catch-Me-Who-Can,” which ran on an oval track near the site of Euston Square in north London. Passengers rode for one shilling each. Once again, bad luck dogged him, and, after a rail broke and the locomotive left the track, the venture, which had never been a financial success, was aborted.

The next year, 1809, Trevithick was consulted on the practicality of a tunnel under the Thames. His experimental driftway was three-quarters complete when he seems to have tunneled too near the riverbed. The passage was flooded and his efforts abandoned.

In 1811, Trevithick went bankrupt. The same year saw him collaborate with the London engineer Matthew Murray on a high-pressure steam engine and boiler for L’Actif, a captured French privateer that was being outfitted as a packet boat. The engine was later used on the Courier, which made one of the first sea voyages by steam along the English coast. The following year, 1812, Trevithick turned his attention to agriculture. He experimented with a steam plow and constructed a powered threshing machine that proved an unqualified success but was not adopted. In the same year, he developed a cylindrical boiler that was widely used as a steam-supplier for stationary engines until 1844.

By 1814, Trevithick became absorbed with a plan to engineer the famous mines of Peru on Cornish principles. Nine of his engines were shipped out to Lima with several of his associates as engineers. It was a complete success, and in 1816, Trevithick himself gave up all of his prospects in England and set sail. He arrived in Lima in early 1817 and was received royally. After he surmounted countless difficulties and had made and lost several fortunes, Peru’s war of independence broke out. His machines were destroyed, and he was pressed into the army. He invented a new gun. Forced by all the upheavals to leave Peru, Trevithick reached Cartagena on the Isthmus of Panama after several mishaps, nearly drowning, nearly starving, having done some prospecting in Costa Rica, and having lost everything. There, in 1827, he chanced to meet Robert Stephenson, the young railway engineer who was returning home from the mines of Colombia to help his father, George, save his business. Stephenson lent Trevithick fifty pounds to get home. They were shipwrecked before they reached New York.

Back in England, Trevithick lived the remainder of his life in poverty, constantly inventing. His last patent, for the use of superheated steam, was granted in 1832. The previous year, he had been invited to speak before a parliamentary committee that was investigating the use of steam vehicles on roads. He made a sad picture. As the historian of early British motorcars wrote:

One gets the feeling that Trevithick, old, ill, passé, and concerned mainly with talking about his latest steam engine design, was trundled in as a polite gesture to an ancient and revered national monument, who could hardly be ignored on such an occasion—certainly he was little questioned.

Trevithick died a pauper in Dartford, Kent. No stone marks his grave. He was outlived by his wife and six children. Two of his sons themselves became notable engineers.

Significance

Richard Trevithick’s life was dogged by misfortune and his lack of commercial incentive. He was much more concerned with finding new and better ways to apply his inventions than with developing a business around them. He constantly ran out of money and, mainly for that reason, the value of his inventions was often not widely known or appreciated.

It was often several years after his inventions were made that they were taken up by others who were accorded the credit. The Cornish Engine, which gained a worldwide reputation in the nineteenth century, was developed from Trevithick’s high-pressure steam engine of 1800 and his cylindrical boiler of 1812. His work on a road locomotive was rediscovered during the 1820’s and 1830’s by several engineers. The rail locomotive he built in 1804 at Pen-y-darran was reproduced by his assistant, John Steele, the following year at Wylam Colliery near Newcastle and served as a basis for George Stephenson’s experiments a decade and more later.

Later in the nineteenth century, Trevithick was acclaimed “the real inventor of the locomotive” and “one of the greatest mechanical benefactors of our country.” In 1888, a memorial window to Trevithick was erected in Westminster Abbey, a Trevithick medal was enacted by the Institution of Civil Engineers, and an engineering scholarship was endowed in his name at Manchester. Trevithick, the wayward inventor, still suffers from lack of recognition when compared with Watt or the Stephensons. In inventive genius, he was every bit their equal.

Bibliography

Burton, Anthony. Richard Trevithick: The Man and His Machine. London: Aurum Press, 2000. Popular biography, placing Trevithick within the context of Cornwall’s history and economy, explaining how the area’s mining industry spurred development of the steam engine.

Dickenson, H., and A. Titley. Richard Trevithick: The Engineer and the Man. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1934. A good account of the man and his importance in the history of engineering. Sober, but sometimes overly critical of the man’s personal faults. An excellent starting place.

Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Widely regarded as a classic explanation of how and why Europe industrialized.

Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. A brilliant, clearly written, comprehensive account by a famous French historian, it provides the background necessary to understanding why England was the first country to witness an industrial revolution.

Nicholson, T. R. The Birth of the British Motor Car, 1769-1897. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1982. Contains much material on Trevithick either missing elsewhere or lightly passed over. Very useful for a sense of the scope of Trevithick’s genius.

Pike, Fredrick B. The Modern History of Peru. New York: Praeger, 1967. Chapters 2 and 3 explain the troubled times in which Trevithick chose to work in Peru, providing a good description of the intricacies of revolutionary upheaval.

Ransom, P. J. G. Locomotion: Two Centuries of Train Travel. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2001. Ransom begins this railroad history with Trevithick’s invention of the Pen-y-darran locomotive.

Rolt, R. T. C. Victorian Engineering. London: Allen Lane, 1970. Excellent in establishing the place in engineering history held by Cornwall, the bitter rivalry that developed between the Cornish engineers and the Boulton and Watt Company, and Trevithick’s most influential role in the development of steam engines.

Ross, David. The Willing Servant: A History of the Steam Engine. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Tempus, 2004. A history of the steam engine and its impact on society. Ross begins his chronicle with Trevithick’s invention of the first steam engine during the early nineteenth century.

Smiles, Samuel. The Locomotive: George and Robert Stephenson. Vol. 5 in Lives of the Engineers. London: John Murray, 1879. By the famous author of Self-Help (1859), the book contains much valuable information on the early attempts at road locomotives, including much of interest on Trevithick, including his penniless meeting with Robert Stephenson in a Central American seaport in 1827 and their subsequent shipwreck.

Turner, R., and S. L. Goulden. Great Engineers and Pioneers in Technology. Vol. 1. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Although the biographical entry devoted to Trevithick is necessarily short, a perusal of those of his contemporaries and of the next generation of engineers reveals the man’s outstanding importance.