Richard Trevithick
Richard Trevithick was a British inventor and mining engineer. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport, and his most significant contributions were the development of the first high-pressure steam engine and the first working railway steam locomotive. The world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place on 21 February 1804, when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales.
Turning his interests abroad Trevithick also worked as a mining consultant in Peru and later explored parts of Costa Rica. Throughout his professional career he went through many ups and downs and at one point faced financial ruin, also suffering from the strong rivalry of many mining and steam engineers of the day. During the prime of his career he was a well-known and highly respected figure in mining and engineering, but near the end of his life he fell out of the public eye.
Trevithick was extremely strong and was a champion Cornish wrestler.
Childhood and early life
Richard Trevithick was born at Tregajorran, between Camborne and Redruth, in the heart of one of the rich mineral-mining areas of Cornwall. He was the youngest-but-one child and the only boy in a family of six children. He was very tall for the era at, as well as athletic and concentrated more on sport than schoolwork. Sent to the village school at Camborne, he did not take much advantage of the education provided; one of his school masters described him as "a disobedient, slow, obstinate, spoiled boy, frequently absent and very inattentive". An exception was arithmetic, for which he had an aptitude, though arriving at the correct answers by unconventional means.Trevithick was the son of mine "captain" Richard Trevithick and of miner's daughter Ann Teague. As a child he would watch steam engines pump water from the deep tin and copper mines in Cornwall. For a time he was a neighbour of William Murdoch, the steam carriage pioneer, and would have been influenced by Murdoch’s experiments with steam-powered road locomotion.
Trevithick first went to work at the age of 19 at the East Stray Park Mine. He was enthusiastic and quickly gained the status of a consultant, unusual for such a young person. He was popular with the miners because of the respect they had for his father.
Marriage and family
In 1797 Trevithick married Jane Harvey of Hayle. They raised 6 children:- Richard Trevithick
- Anne Ellis
- Elizabeth Banfield
- John Harvey Trevithick
- Francis Trevithick
- Frederick Henry Trevithick
Career
Trevithick became engineer at the Ding Dong Mine in 1797, and there he pioneered the use of high-pressure steam. He worked on building and modifying steam engines to avoid the royalties due to Watt on the separate condenser patent. Boulton & Watt served an injunction on him at Ding Dong, and posted it "on the minestuffs" and "most likely on the door" of the Count House which, although now a ruin, is the only surviving building from Trevithick's time there.
He also experimented with the plunger-pole pump, a type of pump—with a beam engine—used widely in Cornwall's tin mines, in which he reversed the plunger to change it into a water-power engine.
High-pressure engine
As his experience grew, he realised that improvements in boiler technology now permitted the safe production of high-pressure steam, which could move a piston in a steam engine on its own account, instead of using near-atmospheric pressure, in a condensing engine. He was not the first to think of so-called "strong steam" or steam of about. William Murdoch had developed and demonstrated a model steam carriage in 1784 and demonstrated it to Trevithick at his request in 1794. In fact, Trevithick lived next door to Murdoch in Redruth in 1797 and 1798. Oliver Evans in the U.S. had also concerned himself with the concept, but there is no indication that Trevithick knew of his ideas. Independently of this, Arthur Woolf was experimenting with higher pressures whilst working as the Chief Engineer of the Griffin Brewery. This was an engine designed by Hornblower and Maberly, and the proprietors were looking to have the best steam engine in London. Around 1796, Woolf believed he could save substantial amounts of coal consumption.According to his son Francis, Trevithick was the first to make high-pressure steam work in England in 1799, although other sources say he had invented his first high-pressure engine by 1797. Not only would a high-pressure steam engine eliminate the condenser, but it would allow the use of a smaller cylinder, saving space and weight. He reasoned that his engine could now be lighter, more compact, and small enough to carry its own weight even with a carriage attached.
Early experiments
Trevithick began building his first models of high-pressure steam engines – one stationary one and then one attached to a road carriage. A double-acting cylinder was used, with steam distribution by means of a four-way valve. Exhaust steam was vented via a vertical pipe or chimney straight into the atmosphere, thus avoiding a condenser and any possible infringements of Watt's patent. The linear motion was directly converted into circular motion via a crank instead of using a more cumbersome beam.''Puffing Devil''
Trevithick built a full-size steam road locomotive in 1801, on a site near present-day Fore Street in Camborne. Trevithick named his carriage Puffing Devil and on Christmas Eve that year, he demonstrated it by successfully carrying six passengers up Fore Street and then continuing on up Camborne Hill, from Camborne Cross, to the nearby village of Beacon. His cousin and associate, Andrew Vivian, steered the machine. It inspired the popular Cornish folk song "Camborne Hill".During further tests, Trevithick's locomotive broke down three days later after passing over a gully in the road. The vehicle was left under some shelter with the fire still burning whilst the operators retired to a nearby public house for a meal of roast goose and drinks. The boiler went dry, overheating the engine destroying it in a fire. Trevithick did not see this caused by a design flaw, but rather operator error.
In 1802 Trevithick took out a patent for his high-pressure steam engine. To prove his ideas, he built a stationary engine at the Coalbrookdale Company's works in Shropshire in 1802, forcing water to a measured height to measure the work done. The engine ran at forty piston strokes a minute, with an unprecedented boiler pressure of.
Coalbrookdale Locomotive
In 1802 the Coalbrookdale Company in Shropshire built a rail locomotive for him, but little is known about it, including whether or not it actually ran. The death of a company workman in an accident involving the engine is said to have caused the company to not proceed to running it on their existing railway. To date, the only known information about it comes from a drawing preserved at the Science Museum, London, together with a letter written by Trevithick to his friend Davies Giddy. The design incorporated a single horizontal cylinder enclosed in a return-flue boiler. A flywheel drove the wheels on one side through spur gears, and the axles were mounted directly on the boiler, with no frame. On the drawing, the piston-rod, guide-bars and cross-head are located directly above the firebox door, thus making the engine extremely dangerous to fire while moving. Furthermore, the first drawing by Daniel Shute indicates that the locomotive ran on a plateway with a track gauge of.This drawing was used as the basis of all images and replicas of the later "Pen-y-darren" locomotive, as no plans for that locomotive survived.
London Steam Carriage
The Puffing Devil was unable to maintain sufficient steam pressure for long periods, and would have been of little practical use. He built another steam-powered road vehicle in 1803 dubbed the London Steam Carriage, which attracted much attention from the public and press that year when he drove it in London from Holborn to Paddington and back. It was uncomfortable for passengers and proved more expensive to run than a horse-drawn carriage, and was abandoned. In 1831, Trevithick gave evidence to a Parliamentary select committee on steam carriages.Tragedy at Greenwich
Also in 1803, one of Trevithick's stationary pumping engines in use at Greenwich exploded, killing four men. Although Trevithick considered the explosion to be caused by careless operation rather than design error, the incident was heavily exploited by James Watt and Matthew Boulton who highlighted the perceived risks of using high-pressure steam.Trevithick's response was to incorporate two safety valves into future designs, only one of which could be adjusted by the operator. The adjustable valve comprised a disc covering a small hole at the top of the boiler above the water level in the steam chest. The force exerted by the steam pressure was equalised by an opposite force created by a weight attached to a pivoted lever. The position of the weight on the lever was adjustable thus allowing the operator to set the maximum steam pressure. Trevithick also added a fusible plug of lead, positioned in the boiler just below the minimum safe water level. Under normal operation the water temperature could not exceed that of boiling water and kept the lead below its melting point. If the water ran low, it exposed the lead plug, and the cooling effect of the water was lost. The temperature would then rise sufficiently to melt the lead, releasing steam into the fire, reducing the boiler pressure and providing an audible alarm in sufficient time for the operator to damp the fire, and let the boiler cool before damage could occur. He also introduced the hydraulic testing of boilers, and the use of a mercury manometer to indicate the pressure.