Early Experiments in Steam
In the beginning, all railway locomotives were experimental. Railways and the vehicles that worked on them were developed over decades of trial and error, with ideas ranging from, quite literally, world-changing to the downright dangerous.
While railways worked by horses are thought to have been around in the north-east of England since the mid-17th century, they were traditionally limited to the load that could be pulled by a horse.
French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was the first to develop a self-propelled, mechanical land vehicle in 1769. Significantly he was the first to employ a device for turning the reciprocating motion of a steam piston into rotary motion to turn the wheels of his machine. While the machine was said to be unstable, dangerous and slow, it laid the foundations for other inventors and engineers to develop self-propelled steam vehicles.
Most famous of these was Cornishman Richard Trevithick. As the son of a mining engineer, he was familiar with stationary steam engines from an early age and took a great interest in the development of high-pressure steam in the late-18th century. HP steam allowed the use of smaller cylinders to generate power, saving space and weight and Trevithick believed that engines could be made small enough to carry their own weight and tow a trailing load.
In 1801 he built the ‘Puffing Devil’, a self-propelled steam
