Introductory page 2

Murdock had ventured on high-pressure, and with high-pressure steam the Soho firm would have nothing to do. But Richard Trevithick was a high-pressure man in several senses, and from his youth up had made it his peculiar study. Naturally inventive, he was led on to invent a locomotive. From the newspapers he may have heard of what Symington and others were busy at, or he may have been told, perhaps by Murdock himself, of what had occurred on the church path; at any rate eleven years after that he had a model ready.

In 1797, when he was six-and-twenty, he had married and made his home at Moreton House; and here a few weeks afterwards the model was tried. His friend Davies Giddy, in time Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal Society, had brought with him Lord and Lady De Dun-stanville - De Dunstanville, before his peerage Francis Basset, being the great landowner of the district - and Giddy was stoker, and Lady De Dunstanville was engine-man and turned on the steam to the first high-pressure steam-engine.

Shortly afterwards another model was made which ran round the table, or the room. Its boiler and engine were in one piece; hot water was poured into the boiler, and a red-hot cast-iron block put into the oval flue, just like the hot iron in old-fashioned tea-urns. It had a vertical double-acting cylinder, 1.55 in. in diameter, and a 3.6 in. stroke, sunk in the boiler, and the piston rod ended in a guided crosshead, the connecting rods reaching down to crank pins in the two driving wheels which measured 4 in.; and there was a fly-wheel driven by a spur-wheel on the crank shaft. That model is now at South Kensington (M. 1835), where it can be compared with a copy of Murdock's model (M. 2413) which it in no way resembles.

The model was experimented with and improved upon in many ways for some three years before Trevithick ventured on building a machine of full size. While this was in hand he entered on an inquiry as to whether the wheels of a self-propelled carriage ought to be smooth or toothed, and he came to the conclusion that with smooth wheels it would have sufficient hold on any reasonable gradient. To test this he hired the post-chaise that had been kept for Watt's use when he was at Redruth sixteen years before; and with Giddy he took this out on to a road near Camborne, and there, unharnessing the horse, these two men proceeded to work it uphill by applying their strength to the spokes of the wheels. Several times on several slopes they moved it forward in this way, and in no case was there any slip. The result confirmed his expectation that the wheels might have smooth tyres, but, to guard his rights, in the patent of 1802 he expresses himself - "We do occasionally, or in certain cases, make the external periphery of the wheels uneven, by projecting heads of nails or bolts, or cross-grooves, or fittings to railroads when required; and in cases of hard pull we cause a lever, bolt, or claw, to project through the rim of one or both of the said wheels, so as to take hold of the ground; but in general the ordinary structure or figure of the external surface of these wheels will be found to answer the intended purpose."

On Christmas Eve 1801 the engine was ready, and the first load of passengers was moved by steam on what is known in the neighbourhood as "Captain Dick's Puffer." The rain was coming down heavily, the road in places was rough with loose stones, and the gradient such that the wise cyclist walks his machine up, but "she went off like a little bird" for three-quarters of a mile up Beacon Hill at what is now Camborne railway station and home again. Over their Christmas dinner Trevithick and his cousin Andrew Vivian became partners, and they were soon in London armed with letters of introduction from Giddy to Humphry Davy, who introduced them to Rumford, both of whom helped them in securing their patent.

On the 22nd of August 1802 Trevithick was at Coal-brookdale erecting a pumping engine, and wrote from there to Giddy, "The Dale Company have begun a carriage at their own cost for the railroads, and are forcing it with all expedition," but of this little further is known. Later in the year he was in Cornwall building another locomotive which he brought with him to London in 1803, where he learnt from the varieties of paving that such machines would be more efficient on a smooth iron road. And in October he was at the Penydaren Ironworks, near Merthyr Tydvil, building the engine with which the railway era is frequently said to begin.

This was designed for many uses and worked on the tram-road for the first time on Monday the 13th of February 1804. "It worked very well and ran up hill and down hill with great ease, and was very manageable. We had plenty of steam and power," wrote Trevithick to his friend Giddy; and on the following Monday he wrote, "The engine, with water included, is about five tons. It runs up the tramroad of two inches in a yard" - twice as steep as Bromsgrove Lickey - "forty strokes per minute with the empty wagons. The engine moves forward nine feet at every stroke. The steam that is discharged from the engine is turned up the chimney about 3 feet above the fire, and when the engine works forty strokes per minute, 4½ feet stroke, 8¼ inches diameter of cylinder, not the smallest particle of steam appears out of the top of the chimney, though it is but 8 feet above where the steam is delivered into it, neither at a distance from it is steam or water found. The fire burns much better when the steam goes up the chimney than when the engine is idle. I intend to make a smaller engine for the road, as this has much more power than is wanted here. This engine is to work a hammer. We shall continue our journey on the road to-day with the engine until we meet Mr. Homfray and the London engineer, and intend to take the horses out of the coach and draw them home. The coach axles are the same length as the engine axles so the coach will run very easily on the tramroad."

The London engineer had been sent down by the Government with a view to ordering similar engines if this one passed certain tests, these being - "The wagon engine is to lift the water in the pipes, then go by itself from the pump and work a hammer, then wind coal, and lastly to go the journey on the road with a load of iron!"

On the Tuesday the great run took place from the works to the Navigation House. "Yesterday," wrote Trevithick to Giddy, "we proceeded on our journey with the engine; we carried 10 tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy men riding on them the whole of the journey. It is above nine miles, which we performed in four hours and five minutes. The engine, while working, went nearly five miles per hour: no water was put into the boiler from the time we started until we arrived at our journey's end. The coal consumed was 2 cwt. On our return home, about four miles from the shipping place of the iron, one of the small bolts that fastened the axle to the boiler broke, and all the water ran out of the boiler, which prevented the return of the engine until this evening."

The engine continued working, and ten days afterwards was tried with 25 tons of iron. "We were more than a match for that weight," writes Trevithick to Giddy; and continues, "the steam is delivered into the chimney above the damper; when the damper is shut the steam makes its appearance at the top of the chimney; but when open none can be seen. It makes the draught much stronger by going up the chimney; no flame appears." On the 10th of July we have Homfray writing to Giddy, "Trevithick went down the tramroad twice since you left us, with 10 tons each time," so that it must have been kept on duty for some months before it was withdrawn to work the rolling mill. William Richards was its first driver, and he drove no other engine all his life though he was engine-driving at Penydaren until he was over eighty. So far from Trevithick's engine being broken up, it was kept in repair as long as the ironworks lasted, and then little was left of what it was originally built of. Very different all this from the usual story! But the first engine that ran on an iron road is of too much importance for legends about it to be repeated when the truth is known.

During the rest of the year Trevithick was busy about the country superintending the erection of his high-pressure stationary engines. In September he was at Newcastle arranging with Christopher Blackett, the owner of The Globe newspaper, to supply him with a locomotive for Wylam Colliery. This was erected at John Whinfield's works at Gateshead, and was completed in May 1805. The working drawings are at South Kensington (M. 1310). Like the Penydaren engine, on which she was an improvement, she had no bellows draught, Trevithick having abandoned it as soon as he found the steam-blast sufficient. The statement, and the argument built on it, that in 1815 he proposed to use vanners, must be due to some one who never read the specification (No. 3922), which is not for a locomotive but for quite a new kind of stationary engine in which the steam acted as a cushion on the water and was used over again instead of being allowed to escape.

This Gateshead engine was the first with flanged wheels, but these did not suit the Wylam track which then had wooden rails. Three years afterwards these were replaced with the cast-iron rails on which, in 1813, Puffing Billy had an easier task. And so she was taken off and used for many years as a stationary engine. On a temporary iron railway in Whinfield's yard she had worked satisfactorily, being the first engine to work on an iron edge rail. Every one in the district interested in engineering went to see her; and with her the history of the locomotive begins in the north.

During the next ten years several other engines were built by Trevithick, who was a man of many inventions. For some years he was busy with a steam dredger for the Thames and his iron tanks for water cisterns. He was the engineer of the first Thames Tunnel, that of 1809; two years afterwards he built the first steam threshing machine, for Hawkins, and followed this by the steam plough. In 1812 came the Cornish pumping engine as we know it; and in 1815 his screw propeller for steamships for which he proposed a boiler with small tubes through which went the water, not the fire; being, in fact, the first water-tube boiler, foreshadowed in his locomotive boiler.

In 1808 he was in London running his Catch-me-who-can at twelve miles and more an hour on his circular iron road where Torrington Square now is, hauling on the track an open carriage - as he had done Homfray's - in which were passengers at a shilling a head, being in fact the first passenger engine. The track was on longitudinal sleepers, and the engine weighed over eight tons and was more like a modern locomotive than the Gateshead one, for he had abandoned the cog-wheels and also the fly - wheel which still survives on our traction engines and steam rollers.

During 1814 he became connected with a scheme for working certain mines in Peru in the Cornish manner, and he built at Hayle nine of his pumping engines which were shipped for Lima, three of his friends going out with them. Their reports were so favourable that in October 1816 he left for the land of promise, and for seven years he prospered so that he became worth nearly half a million of money; and then the War of Independence broke out by which he was ruined, the natives, looking upon him as a Spanish emissary, blowing up his engine-houses and throwing the machinery down the shafts. With difficulty he escaped with his life, and had to make his way northwards through the forests alone into Costa Rica, where he conceived a scheme for a railway across the isthmus.

In 1805 and thereabouts he had been frequently on Tyneside among the enginemen and others. Twenty-two years afterwards, when upset at the mouth of the Magdalena, he was lassoed from drowning - and an alligator - by Bruce Hall, who took him to Robert Stephenson at Cartagena. "Is that Bobby?" asked Trevithick. "I have nursed him many a time!" And so he had. He and Robert Stephenson left South America together, one full of his project for running a railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the other to help on the Liverpool & Manchester.

When George Stephenson made Trevithick's acquaintance he had just moved to the West Moor Pit at Killing-worth as brakesman. His struggle upward from herding cows at twopence a day had been long and was not over. It is easy to give the years, reeling them off one after the other, and forget that each consisted of twelve months; and it was more than two hundred and fifty months before he began to earn £2 a week. He is credited with more than his due, for in the days when the opposition to railways was at its fiercest it was necessary for parliamentary and advertising purposes to magnify his reputation as an authority on every branch of engineering. He was not the "father of the railway engine" - that honour is Richard Trevithick's - nor was he "the inventor of railways." But his knowledge of the whole matter, derived from the machines and the men who made them, was immense; and his organising powers remarkable. He was in the front all through the fight against the old order of things, the one conspicuous figure to whom the railwaymen looked for leadership; around him the storm centred; and it is to him more than any man that we owe our railway system. In 1811 John Blenkinsop patented (No. 3431) a rail with "a toothed rack or longitudinal piece of cast iron or other fit material having the teeth or protuberances or other parts of the nature of teeth standing either upwards, downwards or sideways"with the intervals of which "a wheel having teeth or protuberances" would engage; and thus he became the originator of our mountain-climbing railways. He was the agent of the Middleton Colliery, and to carry the coals down into Leeds, three and a half miles away, he hit upon this contrivance and laid out the road on which the levels were few and the gradients many. As shown by the Museum specimens (M. 2325) he did not use a rack but "protuberances," as he called them, those being a series of almost semicircular ears arranged along the side of the rail half an inch from the upper edge like so many small arches, each about 3 in. across, 3/8 in. thick, and projecting some 2¼ in. There were seven of these ears to each rail, which was 41 in. long. The top of the rail was smooth and the carrying wheels of the engine were smooth. The driving wheel between them worked out side the rail, not on it, its projections being rounded so as to run easily between the rounded ears. Blenkinsop patented the principle of the rack and wheel, not the engine or "carriage" as he called it. The engines he used were designed and built by Matthew Murray, and had two cylinders, as recommended by Trevithick in his patent of 1802, so arranged that the cranks were at right angles to each other, thus getting over the difficulty of starting. They were the first engines with two cylinders, the first with six wheels - 2-2-2 in fact - and the railway was the first that was financially successful. The first engine made its first run from the colliery to the wharf at Leeds on the 24th of June 1812, its load at the finish being eight wagons carrying twenty-five tons of coal and fifty people. In regular work the trains were composed of as many as thirty wagons, and considering the gradients and the weight of the engine, which was only five tons, Blenkinsop was probably correct in thinking he could not do without his protuberances.