Trevithick Day!

Well today was Trevithick Day. A day to celebrate one of Cornwall’s greatest inventors. This event takes place every year. This year will be 25 years that it has been celebrated in this way. So earlier in the week I gave you a brief summary as to who Richard Trevithick was courtesy of the Richard Trevithick website. Today I’m going to go in depth a bit more.

Richard Trevithick was the first man to make high pressure steam actually work. His first engine was a stationary one. Trevithick wasn’t the first to think about Steam as a good engine. William Murdoch had already developed and demonstrated a model steam carriage to Trevithick in 1784. During 1798-99 Murdoch had moved next door and the pair of them obviously worked closely together as by 1799 the first stationary engine was born. After many months of testing Trevithick believed that he could eliminate the condenser from the stationary model and compact the engine making it small enough to carry its own weight and have a carriage attached. Thus in 1801 the “Puffing Devil” was born. Trevithick had built a full sized steam road locomotive on a site near to the present day Fore Street otherwise known during that time as Camborne Hill. On Christmas Eve that year he demonstrated to the people of Camborne his new toy. Carrying folk on his Steam engine up Camborne Hill and onto the village of Breacon.

In 1802 Trevithick took out a patent for his high pressure steam engine.

Trevithick was always a man to put his ideas into action and in 1802 he built a stationary engine at the Coalbrookdale Company’s works in Shropshire, forcing water to a measured height to measure the work done. The engine ran at 40 piston strokes a minute, with a boiler pressure of 145 psi. The company then apparently built a rail locomotive for him although little is known about it. There have been no plans found and the only known information about it comes from the London Science Museum, a letter written by Trevithick to his friend Davies Giddy which contained a drawing of the locomotive. This is the drawing that is the basis for all the images and replicas of the Penydarren locomotive that was later built.

The “Puffin Devil” constantly broke down as she was unable to maintain a sufficient steam pressure for long periods of time. Then in 1803 he built another steam powered road vehicle called the London Steam Carriage. The press were all over him when he drove it from Holborn in London to Paddington and back. However as you can imagine it wasn’t the most comfortable of rides and of coarse it was more expensive than the cost of running a horse drawn carriage. So the idea never really got off the ground. Although it was a great show piece don’t you think.

During 1802 Trevithick built a high pressure steam engine to drive an automatic hammer at the Pen-y-Darren ironworks near Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales with the help of an employee at the iron works and under the supervision of the proprietor he mounted the engine on wheels and turned it into a locomotive. It was 1803 that Trevithick sold his patent to Samual Homfray for the locomotive.