In 2001 railway enthusiasts celebrated the bicentenary of Richard Trevithick's 'Cornish engine', the world's first self-propelled steam vehicle, and in 2004 further celebrations will mark the two-hundredth anniversary of its successor, the 'Penydarren engine', which hauled a ten-ton load over 9V2 miles of track in South Wales, making it the world's first railway engine. Yet fame and fortune obstinately eluded this great engineer whose reckless, headstrong nature often made him his own worst enemy. But, although he died in poverty and relative obscurity, Trevithick is now recognised as one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the industrial revolution, and his extraordinary and varied career, which took him from his native Cornwall to London and then on to seventeen years of picaresque adventuring in South America, makes for wonderfully lively reading.
