A Steamy Anniversary

Google’s Trevithick Doodle

Today Google’s Doodle commemorates Richard Trevithick’s 240th Birthday. This is a very appropriate gesture as this is a great Cornishman and inventor who changed the world but who died in poverty and is not so well known today. His most significant success was the high pressure steam engine and he also built the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive. On 21 February 1804 the world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place as Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.


British coin commemorating the 200th Anniversary of rail in 2004

The story of Richard Trevithick is one of the great, sad romances of the Industrial Revolution. The son of a Cornish mine captain was not simply an engineer - he was an inventor (his railway engines were running a decade before George Stephenson's) a visionary and a larger-than-life adventurer. But he still ended his life in poverty, wondering how it all went wrong. The youngest of six children, Trevithick was born in 1771 and didn't show much early promise - his schoolmaster reported him as being "disobedient, slow and obstinate."


Richard Trevithick painted by Richard Linnell

To revive his fortunes after a disastrous period working in Peru, being involved in the War of Independence against Spain and making his way to Colombia where amazingly he met Robert Stephenson who gave him £50 to make his way home. Back in England Trevithick took a job in Dartford, Kent building a large steam engine. After he had been working in Dartford for about a year, Trevithick was taken ill with pneumonia and had to retire to bed at The Bull hotel, where he was lodging at the time. Following a week's confinement in bed he died on the morning of 22 April 1833. He was penniless, and no relatives or friends had attended his bedside during his illness. His colleagues at Hall's works made a collection for his funeral expenses and acted as bearers. They also paid a night watchman to guard his grave at night to deter grave robbers, as body snatching was common at that time.


Trevithick's 1804 locomotive. This full-scale replica of his steam-powered railway locomotive is in the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

Trevithick was buried in an unmarked grave in St Edmunds Burial Ground, East Hill, Dartford. The burial ground closed in 1857, with the gravestones being removed in the 1960s. A plaque marks the approximate spot believed to be the site of the grave. The plaque lies on the side of the park, near the East Hill gate, and an unlinked path.

The man who had given the world the high-pressure steam engine, the Cornish boiler, the railway locomotive, the steam dredger, the propeller and the threshing machine, among other innovations, died a lonely and impoverished death with his game changing inventions which remade the world unrecognised. A few months earlier, he had written his own epitaph in a letter to a colleague:

"However much I may be straitened in pecuniary circumstances, the great honour of being a useful subject can never be taken from me which, to me, far exceeds riches."

What a world transforming set of achievements before the great Richard Trevithick ran out of steam in 1833. Well done to Google for recognising a person who was arguably the world’s greatest inventor.


The plaque at St. Edmunds Burial Ground, East Hill, Dartford. With the words "Richard Trevithick Approximately 25ft from this wall lie the remains of Richard Trevithick. The great engineer and pioneer of high pressure steam. He died at the Bull Inn, Dartford and was carried here by fellow workers of Halls Engineering Works. To a paupers grave. Born Illogan, Cornwall April 13th 1771. Died Dartford, Kent April 22nd 1833"