Trevithick was a Cornishman, a geographical fact which gave him lots of experience working with the earliest steam engines -- the giant Cornish beam engines used to pump out mines.
Trevithick, like many others of his time, attempted to design a high-pressure steam engine that would enable him to circumvent the otherwise ruinous patents held by Boulton & Watt. He was also intrigued by the idea of making a self-propelling steam engine. Where others had failed he succeeded.
This full-scale design was constructed in 1803, an odd beast which lacked a separate frame (here the axles were just manufactured as part of the boiler casing), and which powered the wheels on just one side through a rather harsh-looking gear arrangement.
It was primitive and temperamental, but it worked.
Trevithick was a little too pioneering: he made money from some of his inventions but lost a lot more on others (including an extraordinary series of adventures in Latin America).
His first public railway -- the world's first, in fact, a circle of demonstration track on a site now under University College London -- played host to a tiny locomotive called Catch-Me-Who-Can, intended to demonstrate to the public the speed and safety of this new mode of transport.
3 comments:
So glad you have picked up on Trevithick: one of my engineering heroes.
I have long suspected that that charlatan George Stephenson cribbed Trevithick's ideas. Certainly he depended on Tim Hackworth's engineering genius (and probably son Robert's too) for most of the railway stuff credited to him.
Interesting.
How exactly do you drive it?
I can't make out anywhere to sit and all those exposed spinning wheels and cogs looks lethal. In a nice way of course.
On the earliest locos there was usually a primitive tender which held coal supplies, a barrel of water and a shelf of some sort on which the driver would stand.
I'm not sure Geo. Stephenson was a "charlatan", though it's clear throughout most of his working life that his son Robert was the main mechanical engineering genius; Geo. was more of a civils man, and his engineering work at Chat Moss and Olive Mount should not be so easily dismissed. He was also one of the first to have a vision of a truly integrated national railway network. But Hackworth is also an under-appreciated hero, I agree.
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