Trevithick day – Saturday 26th April 2008

Trevithick day will be upon us soon enough. I don’t normally go along to this event but this year I intend to go along camera and blogger notepad in hand. I hear that it’s a great day out and there are loads to do.

So who is this Richard Trevithick anyway I hear you ask. For those of you who are not from Cornwall let me tell you. He is the inventor of the worlds first high pressure steam powered engine. His first ‘baby’ was called “The Puffin Devil”. So let’s prepare the ground with a little information about the man himself.

Lets begin with a biography by Marj Rowland taken from the Trevithick Day website http://www.trevithick-day.org.uk/

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Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) - a short biography
(original research by Marj Rowland)

Richard Trevithick was born in a cottage a mile or so from Dolcoath Mine, where his father was a mine Captain. His curiosity about the engineering aspects of the mining area that he grew up in started at an early age, and this led to a career during which he pioneered the use of high pressure steam, and increased the efficiency of the engines used to pump water from the lower levels of Cornwall's tin and copper mines.

Trevithick's inventive mind was never still - his ideas ranged from the first successful self-powered road vehicle, and a steam railway engine, to schemes for wreck salvage, land reclamation, mechanical refrigeration, agricultural machinery and for tunnelling under the Thames.

Trevithick's career spanned the dawn of the industrial revolution, a time when Cornwall's engineering prowess was the envy of the world. Trevithick spent eleven years in South America, working for owners of silver mines.

Richard Trevithick is buried in an unmarked grave at Dartford, Kent, where he was working when he died. Like many great men and women, Trevithick did not get the recognition he deserved during his lifetime. Indeed, his worth has only recently been recognised by many history books.

He did not acquire riches either; any wealth that came Trevithick's way soon disappeared as he developed his next idea- one of his last ideas, for a competition for a memorial to the "Reform Bill", was for a thousand feet high cast iron column with an air operated lift to convey passengers up the inside!

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