It was over ten years ago that I first had the idea of writing a biography of Richard Trevithick, and it is only now in the year 2000 that it is finally going to appear in print.  Anyone setting off to write the life of someone as well known as Trevithick does so hoping for one of two things, and preferably both - some new information on the subject and a new perspective on the life.  I began with a simple subtitle in mind, which seemed to sum up his main claim to fame - "Father of Railways".  Now, after much reading of books, studying in archives and libraries and talking to others who have looked at his life, that subtitle has gone into the waste bin.  What he achieved was altogether wider and infinitely more complex.  Here was certainly something I had not expected; it was the different perspective I had hoped to find.

To me, as for many others, the key event in the Trevithick story had always been the successful trials of the steam locomotive at Penydarren in 1804.  We now know that there was an earlier test of a Trevithick steam locomotive running on rails at Coalbrookdale, but the Welsh run was the public trial, a triumphant demonstration that what many had declared impossible, a smooth wheeled train being driven over smooth rails, could indeed be done.  This no longer seems to me to be the crucial event in his life, but just one part of a continuous story that began some years earlier.

To understand the huge significance of what Trevithick really did, one has to think back to the steam world of the eighteenth century, ruled by the great beam engines, vast nodding giants, powerful and strong, but rooted to the spot.  One can hardly imagine even quite a small engine, such as the preserved winding engine at East Pool, trundling off down the road.  Throughout the latter part of the century development was controlled by the all embracing patents of Boulton and Watt, and James Watt was adamant on one thing, low pressure steam was good, high pressure steam was bad.  If you wanted more power, you simply built a bigger engine, and that was that.  Then, in 1800, the patents expired, and the way was opened for the bold to try new ideas.

Richard Trevithick was certainly bold and his ideas were revolutionary.  He realised that by increasing steam pressure he could make smaller engines.  The Boulton and Watt engines had all needed separate vessels to condense the steam and to create a partial vacuum: Trevithick had no need of the condenser nor the vacuum, relying instead on the expanding steam to drive the piston.  The exhaust steam simply whistled out into the atmosphere, earning his engines the name of "puffers", These engines were no more than 10 to 12 feet long and 6 feet in diameter, small enough to be taken by cart to wherever they were needed.  The next step has an inevitable logic.   If a small engine can drive the wheels of a machine, why should it not drive itself along? And so, Christmas Eve 1801 saw the puffer set on a wheeled frame, charging up Camborne Hill under its own steam.  The steam engine which since its birth had been massively immobile was now not only portable but could move itself along.

Today, when we think of a vehicle moving under its own power over the ground, we think of the motor car the truck and the railway locomotive, part of a transport system.  But that is because we know what has happened over the last two centuries.  Trevithick was not limited in this way.  He saw his high pressure steam engines as almost infinitely adaptable.  They could be made to work in mines and factories wherever they were needed, and they could get to the site under their own steam.  He also realised, as the locals jumped up on his engine for that first ride up the hill, that the engine could move passengers.  This was just one use among many others, but it was one that he and his partner in the enterprise, Andrew Vivian, pursued from the first.  The result was the London carriage, which can best be described as a sort of steam powered stage coach.  It was one thing to produce the power, but he was also faced with a quite new problem, how to steer the machine.  Again, to understand why this was a problem, one has to think back to the situation at the time.  No one had ever had to steer a self-propelling land vehicle before.  With a stage coach, you used the reins to steer the horses and the carriage followed on behind.  That was no help, so Trevithick turned to another form of transport for inspiration, the sailing ship.  Here the tiller moved the rudder, so he used a tiller-like device to turn the front wheels of his steam carriage, It proved extremely awkward in use, and ended up with the overturning and destruction of the Camborne engine.  The trouble lay with the rough, bumpy roads of the time.  With the London carriage, he tried to ease the problem by using huge driving wheels, but it still proved all but uncontrollable.  This, as much as the opposition of local authorities and the government, was to prevent the steam carriage ever finding general acceptance.  What was needed was a smooth road on which the engines could run, and such roads, of a very special kind were to be found in various parts of Britain.  They were called tramways.

Tramways were tracks laid with cast iron rails, generally linking a colliery or manufacturing works to a river or canal.  One of these was the Penydarren tramway that linked Richard Hill's iron works at Merthyr Tydfil to the Glamorganshire Canal at Abercynon.  As we all know, it was on this tramway that Trevithick won the wager that his engine could haul 10 tons of iron to the canal and haul back the empties.  And so, we say, the railway age was born.  But to Trevithick, the railway was only a part of the story.  The whole point of his engine was that it could be used in the works to drive machinery by jacking up the driving wheels, and then when a full load was ready, be set down on the rails to fulfill its other function as a locomotive.  This made perfect sense, as all the tramways then in existence connected places where his puffers were needed with navigable waterways, and the waterways formed a complex system that was already capable of moving goods in bulk to all parts of the country.  Trevithick had begun by supplying a "puffer" for the Penydarren iron works, and had converted it to a locomotive for the trials.  Most accounts end the story there, but according to a Mr Rees Jones who worked there at the time, the engine survived long after 1804, Its last years were spent doing exactly what it was designed to do in the first place, driving machinery at the works.  Yet, some commentators have insisted that because the engine spent a comparatively short time working as a locomotive, it was a failure.  But as Rees Jones made clear, there was nothing wrong with the engine itself: "She worked very well; but frequently her weight broke the tram plates and also the hooks between the trams".

It has often been suggested that if Trevithick had been a firmer character, he could have persevered with the railway locomotive and been the undisputed "father of railways", but his expertise lay with steam, and it was not there that the problem lay.  It was not until the 1820s that rolled wrought iron rails were available to replace the brittle cast iron plates of the tramways.  That, however, does not mean that we cannot draw a direct line from his pioneering work through to the triumph of the Stephensons and others.  The first true commercial railway was built to serve Middleton Colliery near Leeds.  John Blenkinsop and Matthew Murray devised a rack railway system, which gave greater adhesion than smooth wheels on standard lines.  This meant that a very light locomotive could be used.  The locomotive itself was not just based on Trevithick's ideas but was acknowledged as such, for they paid him a royalty, It attracted enormous interest and among those who came to see it was a young engineer from the north east, George Stephenson.  It was the first locomotive he had ever seen, and here we have the direct link, straight back to Trevithick.  But he had already moved on, finding ever more uses for the high pressure engine, in dredging, driving boats, loading ships, working farm machinery - the list if not endless is mightily impressive.  Yes, he was the originator of the modern railway, but more importantly he was the man who showed the world the infinite possibilities of steam power once it was freed from the huge engine house where James Watt had incarcerated it.

It is common to contrast "unsuccessful" Richard Trevithick with "successful" James Watt.  But they were not just different characters, they worked in quite different ways.  Watt, to put it rather too simply, had one brilliant idea which he developed throughout the rest of his life and which he was able to turn to great profit by teaming up with a successful entrepreneur, Matthew Boulton.  Trevithick was a man who was constantly looking for new ideas, who saw an endless procession of uses for his own types of very different steam engines.  His great "mistake" is often said to be his South American venture.  But he rose to a challenge which no one else could meet - to provide a steam engine that could be taken up a terrifyingly narrow mule track and set to work at an altitude of over 14,000 ft in the inhospitable heart of the Andes.  And he succeeded.  Perhaps a Cornish engineer can be forgiven for not knowing about South American politics, but when the revolutionary forces came to Cerro de Pasco, Trevithick's share of the bullion raised from the silver mines would have brought him home as a man of immense fortune.  In the event they confiscated it all.  But how do you measure failure? In terms of one man' s loss of a fortune, or should we perhaps take note of the fact that thanks to Richard Trevithick the mines of Cerro de Pasco continue to thrive to this day?

During my researches, my admiration for Richard Trevithick has steadily grown, but one thought always saddened me, that in spite of all he had done in his busy and ever inventive life, he had died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.  The final visit I made before starting to write the biography was to Dartford where he died in 1833.  His last days were said to be those of a broken man, saddened by failure.  Yet those who knew him then spoke of lively evenings in the Bull coffee-room, reminiscing about his adventures in South America and his triumphs in Cornwall, and still planning new wonders to astonish the world.  He won the respect and affection of the men who worked with him at Dartford.  Even the pauper's grave turns out to be a myth.  His gold watch was sold to pay the funeral expenses and the funeral was quite a grand affair, with a full set of pall bearers from the local works.  They even mounted guard over his grave at night to keep his body from the grim clutches of the resurrectionists.  One of those guards was a Mr Aldous, and his grandson Thomas Aldous wrote to the local paper in 1902, telling how his grandfather used to show him the great man's grave, not an anonymous pauper's plot, but decently marked with a properly carved headstone.  Somehow it seemed fitting that the last day of research was the day that saw the end of the final myth.