Trevithick, Richard

Trevithick, Richard (1771-1833), British mechanical engineer and inventor, and one of the pioneers of railway locomotion. Trevithick was born on April 13, 1771, in Illogan, near Camborne and Redruth, a tin-mining district in Cornwall. His father was a mine manager, and Trevithick too, at the age of 19, began his career in mining as an engineer. He was intuitive and talented in solving mechanical problems from an early age. His wife, Jane Harvey, came from a prominent engineering family. His son, Francis, continued his father’s interests as locomotive superintendent of the London and Western Railway, and wrote his father’s biography.

Steam engines were imperative in the Cornish mines for pumping and hoisting, but fuel costs had to be kept down, as there were no local coal mines. In 1796, Trevithick exhibited models of both stationary and locomotive high-pressure, non-condensing steam engines, which were an improvement on the low-pressure engines developed by the Scottish inventor James Watt. Because of savings in weight they were light enough to be transported in farm wagons. On December 24, 1801, Trevithick put into operation the first steam-propelled vehicle ever to carry passengers, and the following year he took out with his cousin, Andrew Vivian, a patent for high-pressure stationary and locomotive engines. In 1803 his second steam carriage drove through London, and he built the world’s first steam railway locomotive, which for a wager, in 1804, was the first application of steam to the hauling of loads on a railway when it carried 10 tons of iron about 15 km (9y mi) from Merthyr Tydfil to Abercynon, Glamorgan, Wales. In 1808 his third locomotive, Catch Me Who Can, carried passengers on a circular track near Euston Road, in London. However, he gave up on railway locomotives as the brittle cast-iron rails that he used soon broke with the weight of his engines. Instead, he turned his high-pressure steam engines to other applications: driving an iron mill and the paddle wheels of a barge (1805); a steam dredger (1806); and an agricultural threshing machine (1812).

After an unscrupulous partner caused his bankruptcy, he sailed to South America in 1816 in order to construct his steam engines for the Peruvian silver mines, but lacking business acumen, returned penniless in 1827. He died in poverty on April 22, 1833, in Dartford, Kent, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Many consider him to be the real inventor of the steam locomotive, but during the key years of his absence other locomotive engineers, notably George Stephenson, carried his work forward.