Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/264

 258 THE CORNWALL COAST irritated his master by offering to do six sums to his one — a proposition which no pedagogue is Hkely to appreciate. He was powerfully developed physically, and at eighteen could lift ten hundred- weight. In 1791 he became engineer at the Ding Dong Mine, where he introduced many improve- ments ; and a few years later he was busily engaged in designing a genuine steam-carriage, which was finished and made its first short trip on Christmas Eve, 1801, carrying the first passengers ever known to have been conveyed by steam. Locally this contrivance was known as .the " puffing devil," or as " Cap'n Dick's Puffer." The next step was to produce an engine running on rails. This was done in 1804, when Trevi thick completed a machine which carried ten tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy men for a distance of nine and a half miles, the speed being about five miles an hour. Clumsy and slow as it was, this was a very marked advance on anything that had previously been accomplished. But the engineer's genius for invention was not balanced by adequate business capacity, and he lacked the means of perfecting and forwarding his devices ; they had to w^ait. He went to Peru in 1817, and suffered heavy losses through the war of in- dependence. At this time he was nearly drowned in the Magdalena River, but was rescued by a Venezuelan officer, who drew him ashore with a lasso. It is pleasant to learn that he made the acquaintance of George Stephenson at Cartha- gena, and received generous help from one who might have been considered his rival. He died poor and in debt at Dartford in 1833, when the workmen with whom he had been labouring clubbed together to give him a suitable funeral.