Richard Trevithick: The Forgotten Hero of Steam
Richard Trevithick, “perhaps the outstanding mechanical engineer of his generation,” transformed human life by pioneering high-pressure steam engines.
Before the Industrial Revolution, human life was bleak. Men, women, and children had to do grueling manual labor all day to produce basic necessities. Aside from a privileged few, nobody had the time or energy to indulge in hobbies or produce other values. Most people were essentially confined to their hometowns, and the long-distance trade of goods was limited. Transportation was excruciatingly slow, exceedingly dangerous, and prohibitively expensive, limited to the speed and pulling power of a team of horses on a gravel road.1
Steam power changed all that. In half a century, it made possible a world of abundance. It enabled the automation of factories and mills, freeing up people’s time and increasing the availability of goods and necessities. It made efficient intercity transportation possible, empowering people to travel in search of new opportunities and to trade across great distances. It enabled progress in mining and manufacturing that drove development of new materials and technologies. Few innovations have ever had such a dramatic impact on human life.
The two men most often credited with the advent of steam power are James Watt, who perfected Thomas Newcomen’s prototypes into workable engines; and George Stephenson, who designed and built the first steam locomotives to haul passengers and freight between cities. Both men are heroes whose work improved the lives of millions. But an often-overlooked hero made a vital contribution to the development of the steam engine without which it could not have had the impact that it did: Richard Trevithick.
In the late 18th century, Watt had perfected an operational steam engine design, but it was huge; each of his engines filled an entire hall, and its cylinders were large enough to stand inside.2 These engines were pretty much only useful for powering large industrial machinery; Watt thought that an engine small enough to mount on wheels would explode because of the steam pressure required to drive it.3 Trevithick—still in his twenties and working in the mines of southwest England where space was at a premium—thought that he could build an engine capable of handling pressures up to ten times higher than Watt’s.4
Described by his schoolteachers as “disobedient, slow and obstinate,” Trevithick was a maverick who didn’t take “no” for an answer.5 He built his first working models of a high-pressure engine between 1797 and 1799, carefully designing them to avoid infringing on Watt’s patents and omitting some of the latter’s space-consuming components (such as a condenser on the exhaust).
Trevithick realized that his high-pressure engines would be small enough to mount on wheels, creating a self-powered vehicle. He built his first motorized “carriage,” named Puffing Devil, in 1801. It was ahead of its time, far too heavy and cumbersome for Cornwall’s unpaved roads designed for horse-drawn carts. Crossing gulleys and potholes often rendered it inoperable, and it ultimately crashed into a house. But it proved that a motorized carriage could work, and Trevithick realized that a similar vehicle running on rails could transform the mining industry by safely hauling loads far too heavy for horses. Accordingly, he patented a design for an engine that could run on a road or on rails.
He then produced a series of high-pressure engines, including commercial static engines and experimental mobile ones, learning from the performance of each to hone the design. A fatal explosion of one of his static engines in a mill (which he attributed to improper operation but that his critics attacked as proof of a flaw in his concept) encouraged him to add safety valves and pressure-testing procedures to his subsequent designs.6 In 1802, he built what would become the most important engine of his career—a static engine named Pen-y-Darren—although its significance would not become clear for another two years.
Although Trevithick designed Pen-y-Darren to power a Welsh ironworks, the works’ owner, Samuel Homfray, had him convert it into a locomotive to win a bet Homfray had made with another ironmaster. The object of the bet was to build the first locomotive capable of hauling ten tons of iron a distance of ten miles. Trevithick and Homfray tested the now-mobile Pen-y-Darren in 1804, hooking it up to wagons loaded with the iron as well as seventy men. The engine successfully pulled the load the whole ten miles and subsequently pulled a load of twenty-five tons, winning the bet and proving that Trevithick’s design worked and could replace horse power many times over.7
Unfortunately, much like the roads, the nascent railways of the time were designed for horse-drawn wagons and were not suited to such heavy loads. Iron rails regularly snapped under Trevithick’s engines, limiting customers’ interest in buying them. He attempted to demonstrate another engine—named Catch Me Who Can—on a circular track in London in 1808, offering passenger rides to demonstrate its speed capabilities, but the engine broke a rail and crashed, causing what little interest there was to evaporate.8
Convinced that he had sufficiently demonstrated the merits of the steam-powered locomotive, Trevithick was frustrated by the lack of interest. He moved on to other projects, designing machinery for industrial and maritime applications before departing Britain on an exploratory voyage.9 Not until 1824, while Trevithick was exploring South America, did another engineer—George Stephenson—design a locomotive, and a railway for it to run on, capable of conveying passengers from one city to another in comfort and safety.
Today, Stephenson is celebrated as the inventor of the steam locomotive, but it was Trevithick who pioneered and demonstrated the technology that Stephenson and others would develop further. A few people who have recognized Trevithick’s role have honored him by building replicas of his engines. They include Jim Rees, a curator of Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, who built a replica of Puffing Devil and described Trevithick as “perhaps the outstanding mechanical engineer of his generation.”10 The Welsh National Waterfront Museum in Swansea also houses a replica of Pen-y-Darren. These replicas are monuments to a hero who vastly improved human life by doggedly persevering to design and demonstrate high-pressure steam engines—and working steam locomotives—when many around him thought such machines were impossible.