The Genius Next Door
William Murdoch’s experiments with steam traction impressed his next-door neighbour, with world-changing results.
1784
© Philip Halling, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.
A full-scale working replica of William Murdoch’s historic model occupies pride of place on this roundabout in Redruth, Cornwall, where Murdoch worked and, as luck would have it, where he also lived next door to Richard Trevithick.
Introduction
The clever hand-powered wooden tricycle that a young William Murdoch built with his father made a triumphant reappearance many years later as a miniature steam-powered vehicle. That in turn led to the railway revolution – courtesy of his next-door-neighbour.
AS a boy, William Murdoch built a contraption which was the talk of his hometown of Lugar in Ayrshire: the ‘wooden horse’, a tricycle propelled by handcranks, in which he would ride the two miles to Crumnock. It was ‘Shanks’s pony’, however, that took him more than three hundred miles to Birmingham in 1777, looking for a job with engineering firm Boulton and Watt.
While maintaining and significantly improving James Watt’s cutting-edge steam-powered pumps in Cornish tin-mines, William kept up his hobby. By 1784 his engineering experience had magically transformed his crude, hand-powered ‘wooden horse’ into a neat, miniaturised steam-powered tricycle, puffing round and round his living room all by itself.
This was no toy. It was the first self-propelled vehicle in Britain.* William’s next-door neighbour in Redruth, Richard Trevithick, drew on it to build his own full-size steam carriages, and then, in 1804, the historic steam locomotive that gave birth to the railways, and the modern world.
Based on ‘Men of Invention and Industry’, by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904).
There is some dispute about the world’s first, but it was probably Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s military steam wagon of 1769, which can be seen in this replica. At full-scale, Murdoch’s model, designed for civilian transport, would have been lighter and faster – and at least the smoke and steam would have been behind you!
See also The First Train Journey by Steam, which tells how Richard Trevithick developed his steam locomotive.
