Qualla: Richard Trevithick

Richard Trevithick: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Linnell, Public domain. On the morning of 21 February 1804, a strange machine sat on the cast-iron tramway at the Penydarren Ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil. It had a boiler, a single horizontal cylinder, a tall flywheel, and rails for wheels. Behind it were hooked five wagons loaded with ten tons of iron and seventy curious passengers. Two ironmasters, Samuel Homfray and Richard Crawshay, had a bet running on whether the contraption could haul that load nine and three-quarter miles to Abercynon. The bet was 500 guineas. At an average speed of about 2.4 miles per hour, in four hours and five minutes, the machine won the bet. It was the world's first railway journey by a steam locomotive. The man who built it was a six-foot-tall Cornish wrestler, school dropout and arithmetic prodigy named Richard Trevithick.

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Image: John Linnell | Public domain

Richard Trevithick: The Boy at the Mines

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Linnell, Public domain. Trevithick was born on 13 April 1771 at Tregajorran, in the parish of Illogan, between Camborne and Redruth in the heart of the Cornish mining country. His father was a mine captain. His mother was a miner's daughter. He was the only boy in a family of six children. A schoolmaste...

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Image: John Linnell | Public domain

Richard Trevithick: High-Pressure Steam

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Science Museum, Public domain. The steam engines of the day, designed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton, ran near atmospheric pressure with a separate condenser. Watt held the patents, and Cornish mine owners hated the royalties they had to pay. Trevithick, working at the Ding Dong Mine from 1797, began buildi...

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Image: Science Museum | Public domain

Richard Trevithick: Puffing Devil and Pen-y-Darren

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anup Sadi, CC BY-SA 4.0. On Christmas Eve 1801, in Camborne, Trevithick demonstrated a full-size steam road locomotive he called Puffing Devil. With his cousin Andrew Vivian steering, it carried six passengers up Camborne Hill. The Cornish folk song "Camborne Hill" is still sung about that day. Three day...

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Image: Anup Sadi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Richard Trevithick: Peruvian Silver and a Costa Rican Jungle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, CC0. What followed for Trevithick was, in some ways, the eternal story of an inventor twenty years ahead of his market. He built a passenger steam carriage in London in 1803. He built Catch Me Who Can, the first locomotive to give paying passengers rides, in a circle of track in 1808 ...

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Image: Daderot | CC0

Richard Trevithick: A Pauper's Grave and a Plaque

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Conay, CC BY 3.0. He kept inventing. A Cornish boiler. A reaction turbine, twenty-four feet across, an ancestor of the steam turbines that would power twentieth-century power stations. A storage room heater. A thousand-foot iron column to commemorate the Reform Bill. None of them made him rich. He...

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Image: Conay | CC BY 3.0