Part 3 (1/2)
RICHARD TREVITHICK
Born in Illogan, in the west of Cornwall, England, April 13, 1771. Died in Dartford, Kent, April 22, 1833.
Richard Trevithick had meager educational advantages. His father was manager of the Dolcoath and other mines, and shortly after the birth of his son moved to Penponds, near Camborne, where the boy was sent to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, which were the limits of his attainments. Early in life he showed the dawning of remarkable inventive genius, was quick at figures and clever in drawing. He developed into a young man of notable physique, being six feet two inches high, and having the frame and the strength of an athlete. He was one of the most powerful wrestlers in the west country, and it is related of him that he could easily lift a thousand-weight mandril.
At the age of eighteen young Trevithick began to a.s.sist his father as mine manager, and at once proceeded to put his inventive faculty to practical test. His initial success, in 1795, was an improvement upon an engine at the Wheal Treasury mine, which accomplished a great saving in fuel and in power, and won for him his first royalty. Before his father died, in 1797, he had attained to the position of engineer at the Ding Dong mine, near Penzance, and had already set up at the Herland mine the engine built by William Bull, with improvements of his own. His earliest invention of importance was in 1797, when he made an improved plunger pump, which, in the following year, he developed into a double-acting water-pressure engine. One of these engines, set up in 1804, at the Alport mine, in Derbys.h.i.+re, was run until 1850.
[Ill.u.s.tration: RICHARD TREVITHICK]
In 1780 he built a double-acting high-pressure engine with a crank, for Cook's Kitchen mine. This was known as the Puffer, from the noise that it made, and it soon came into general use in Cornwall and South Wales, a successful rival of the low-pressure steam vacuum engine of Watt.
As early as 1796 Trevithick began to give attention to the subject of steam locomotion, and a model constructed by him before 1800 is now in the South Kensington Museum. He busied himself in designing and building a steam vehicle to travel upon the common highways. The work was done in a workshop at Camborne, and some of it in the shop of Captain Andrew Vivian.
It was Christmas Eve of 1801 when this steam locomotive was completed and was brought out for trial.
The following account of the first trial was made by one who was present: ”I knew Captain d.i.c.k Trevithick very well. I was a cooper by trade, and when Trevithick was making his steam carriage I used to go every day into John Tyack's shop at the Weith, close by here, where they put her together. In the year 1801, upon Christmas Eve, towards night, Trevithick got up steam, out on the high road, just outside the shop. When we saw that Trevithick was going to turn on steam, we jumped up, as many as could, maybe seven or eight of us. 'Twas a stiffish hill going up to Camborne Beacon, but she went off like a little bird. When she had gone about a quarter of a mile there was a rough piece of road covered with loose stones. She didn't go quite so fast, and as it was a flood of rain, and we were very much squeezed together, I jumped off. She was going faster than I could walk, and went up the hill about half a mile further, when they turned her and came back again to the shop.” The next day the engine steamed to Captain Vivian's house, and a few days subsequently, Trevithick and Vivian started off for Tehidy House, where Lord Dedunstanville lived, some two or three miles from Camborne. On this journey they met with an accident, the engine being overturned in going around a curve; but they got back safely.
This carriage presented the appearance of an ordinary stage coach on four wheels. The engine had one horizontal cylinder which, together with the boiler and the furnace-box, was placed in the rear of the hind axle.
The-motion of the piston was transmitted to a separate crank-axle, from which, through the medium of spur-gear, the axle of the driving-wheel, which was mounted with a fly-wheel, derived its motion. The steam c.o.c.ks and the force-pump, as also the bellows used for the purpose of quickening combustion in the furnace, were worked off the same crank axle. This was one of the first successful high-pressure engines constructed on the principle of moving a piston by the elasticity of steam against the pressure only of the outside atmosphere.
In the following year Trevithick went to London with his cousin, Andrew Vivian, and secured a patent. Early in 1803 he made his second steam carriage. This was built at Camborne and taken to London, via Plymouth, for exhibition. Its journey along the highways thoroughly alarmed the country people. Coleridge relates that a toll-gate keeper was so frightened at the appearance of the sputtering, smoke-spitting thing of fearsome mien that, trembling in every limb and with teeth chattering, he threw aside the toll-gate with the scared exclamation, ”No--noth--nothing to pay. My de--dear Mr. Devil, do drive on as fast as you can. Nothing to pay!”
The engine in this carriage had a cylinder five and one-half inches in diameter, with a stroke of two and one-half feet, and with thirty pounds of steam it worked five strokes per minute. In every way it was superior to its predecessor. It was not so heavy; and the horizontal cylinder, instead of the vertical, added very much to its steadiness of motion; while wheels of a larger diameter enabled it the more easily to pa.s.s over rough roads which had brought the Camborne one to a standstill. The boiler was made entirely of wrought iron, and the cylinder was inserted horizontally, close behind the driving axle. A forked piston-rod was used, the ends working in guides, so that the crank axle might be brought near to the cylinder. Spur gearing and couplings were used on each side of the carriage for communicating motion from the crank shaft to the main driving axle. The driving-wheels were about ten feet diameter, and made of wood.
The framing was of wrought iron. The coach was intended to seat eight or ten persons, and the greater part of the weight came on the driving axle.
The coach was suspended upon springs.
The London steam carriage was put together at Felton's carriage shop, in Leather Lane, and after its completion, Vivian one day ran the locomotive from Leather Lane, Gray's Inn Lane, on to Lords' Cricket Ground, to Paddington, and home again by way of Islington, a journey of ten miles through the streets of London. Several trips were made in Tottenham Court Road and Euston Square, and only once did they meet with accident.
Finally, however, the frame of the carriage got twisted, and the engine was detached and set to driving a mill.
Trevithick's next experiment was made in 1803-4, while he was engineer of the Pen-y-darran iron works, near Merthyr Tydvil, where he built and ran on a railway a locomotive that was fairly successful. In 1808 he built a locomotive for a circular railway or steam circus that he and Andrew Vivian set up in London, near Euston Square. This ran for several weeks, carrying pa.s.sengers at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles an hour around curves of fifty or one hundred feet radius. One day a rail broke and the engine was overturned, which ended the exhibition.
Subsequently, Trevithick applied his high-pressure engine to rock-boring and breaking, and dredging. He laid out a system of dredging the Thames River, planned a tunnel under the Thames, invented a high-pressure steam thres.h.i.+ng engine in 1812, constructed iron tanks and buoys, and modeled an iron s.h.i.+p. He was one of the first to conceive the practical use of steam in agriculture, declaring that the use of the steam engine for this purpose would ”double the population of the kingdom and make our markets the cheapest in the world.”
In 1814, Trevithick became interested in a plan to work the silver mines of Peru by Cornish methods, and nine of his high-pressure engines were sent to South America in charge of Henry Vivian and other engineers. He himself followed in 1816, and remained in that country ten years, making and losing several fortunes during that time. Finally, in a revolution, the mining plants were destroyed, and he was forced to leave the country, penniless. For a time he was prospecting in Costa Rica, where he planned a railroad across the Isthmus from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1827 he returned to England, still a poor man, and settling in Dartford, Kent, devoted himself to new inventions, unsuccessfully endeavoring to secure the help of the government in his work. His later years were spent in poverty, and when he died, the expense of his burial was borne by his fellow-workmen of Dartford.
Undoubtedly, Trevithick was one of the foremost English engineers of his day, a period that was rich with strong men of distinction in his profession. By many he has been considered as having contributed more even than James Watt to the development of the steam engine and its broader adaptation to practical uses. In his early years he was restrained in putting his ideas and experiments to practical test by the restrictions of Watt's patents. Finally when that difficulty was removed he at once took a leading position in his profession. Especially in the development of the high pressure engine he is ent.i.tled to at least as much credit as any man of his day. His genius was fully recognized in his generation and his impoverished old age was the result of financial reverses in business operations and not from the lack of substantial rewards for his inventive achievements.
DAVID GORDON
The first experiments of David Gordon, who in 1819 was working with William Murdock, in Soho, were for the purpose of using compressed air for common road locomotives. He also invented a portable gas apparatus, and originated a society of gentlemen, with the intention of forming a company for the purpose of running a mail coach and other carriages by means of a high-pressure engine, or of a gas vacuum or pneumatic engine, supplied with portable gas. Alexander Gordon, his son, states that ”the committee of the society had only a limited sum at their disposal, nor were there to be more funds until a carriage had been propelled for a considerable distance at the rate of ten miles an hour.” David Gordon then tried to prevail upon the committee to make use of a steam engine, but evidently without success.
In 1821 he took out a patent for improvements in wheel carriages, and his locomotive is fully described in the interesting Treatise on Elemental Locomotion, by Mr. Alexander Gordon. The machine consisted of a large hollow cylinder about nine feet in diameter and five long, having its internal circ.u.mference provided with a continuous series of cogged teeth, into which were made to work the cogged running wheels of a locomotive steam engine, similar to that of Trevithick. The steam power being communicated to the wheels of the carriage, caused them to revolve, and to climb up the internal rack of the large cylinder. The center of gravity of the engine being thus constantly made to change its position, and to throw its chief weight on the forward side of the axis of the cylinder, the latter was compelled to roll forward, propelling the vehicle before it, and whatever train might be added.
Gordon's next attempt to construct locomotive carriages for the common road was in 1824. The means proposed was a modification of the method invented by William Brunton. But instead of the propellers being operated upon by the alternating motion of the piston-rod, as in Brunton's vehicle, Gordon contrived to give them a continuous rotatory action and to apply the force of the engines in a more direct manner. The carriage ran upon three wheels, one in the front to steer by, and two behind to bear the chief weight. Each of the wheels had a separate axle, the ends of which had their bearings upon parallel bars, the wheels rolling in a perpendicular position. This arrangement, by avoiding the usual cross-axle, afforded an increased uninterrupted s.p.a.ce in the body of the vehicle.
In the fore part of the carriage were placed the steam engines, consisting of two bra.s.s cylinders, in a horizontal position, but vibrating upon trunnions. The piston-rods of these engines gave motion to an eight-throw crank, two in the middle for the cylinders, and three on each side, to which were attached the propellers; by the revolution of the crank, these propellers or legs were successively forced outwards, with the feet of each against the ground in a backward direction, and were immediately afterwards lifted from the ground by the revolution of another crank, parallel to the former, and situated at a proper distance from it on the same frame. The propelling-rods were formed of iron gas-tubes, filled with wood, to combine lightness with strength. To the lower ends of these propelling-rods were attached the feet, in the form of segments of circles, and made on their under side like a short and very stiff brush of whalebone, supported by intermixed iron teeth, to take effect in case the whalebone failed. These feet pressed against the ground in regular succession, by a kind of rolling, circular motion, without digging it up.