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Legacy of a visionary inventor

Nominated by Loveday Jenkin

Exhibition designed by Jason Cleverly

Location Carbis Bay, St Ives "Disobedient, slow and obstinate” was how Richard Trevithick was described in his schooldays. Who would have thought that he was to become one of Cornwall’s greatest designers and inventors?

Trevithick designed his first model high-pressure steam engines to replace horse transport and drain the mines.  In his engines the used steam from the cylinders exhausted to atmosphere, avoiding the need for James Watt’s patented condenser.

The engine was smaller, cheaper and more efficient than that of Watt.  It was a significant technological step forward that replaced Watt’s expensive lumbering engines and avoided his demand for payments from all who used them.  It arrived just as Watt’s patent expired and he left Cornwall for good.

One invention wasn’t enough for Trevithick.  He went on to design the Cornish boiler, a dredger, the ships’ propeller and refrigeration.  His first railway locomotive was running twenty-five years before George Stephenson’s Rocket.  Trevithick’s engine design drove the industry and transport of the Industrial Revolution.  The principles in Trevithick’s boiler are still used today in nuclear power stations and are being incorporated into other ideas for clean forms of energy.

As we seek an alternative to fossil fuels, we can learn from Trevithick, a man well before his time.  His high pressure engine revolutionized the power of steam, and its further development is being researched.  Who knows –his engines from the past may give us answers in the future?

One thing’s for sure.  Trevithick may have been disobedient, even obstinate.  But he was never slow.  On the contrary, it was his ideas that helped us to move faster and travel further. 

And who knows how far they will go?