'James Fairbairn,
who writes as well as rheumatic gout will let him.
'P.S.—I forgot to say the name of the officer is Hall.
'To E. W. Watkin, Esq., M.P.'
On recognising Stephenson, Trevithick is said to have exclaimed, 'Is that Bobby!—I've nursed him many a time.' The younger engineer had £100 in his pocket, and generously gave his senior half of it to facilitate his return to England, which Trevithick shortly afterwards accomplished, by way of Jamaica, in the autumn of 1827, landing at Falmouth on the 9th October, after a weary, anxious absence of eleven years. His health does not seem to have been much injured; but his belongings were simply the clothes he stood upright in, a gold watch, a pair of dividers, a magnetic needle, and a pair of spurs. A friend had to pay his passage-money before he could leave the ship which brought him home.
But he had the happiness of finding his wife and their family of four sons and two daughters all well. The Church bells rang out a merry peal of welcome; and he was entertained at the houses of all the principal people in the county. A great deal was said of the handsome remuneration which was due to him for having been the means, through his many inventions, of saving Cornwall half a million of money,—but little or nothing seems to have come of all the talk; and when he claimed £1,000 from each of the leading mines which had adopted his machinery, they seem—so far as I can ascertain, with one exception only—to have repudiated them. The exception to which I refer was a compromise of his claims by the Messrs. Williams, of Scorrier, in respect of certain mines in which they were interested, for the sum of £150. Nor was his petition to Parliament, dated 27th February, 1828, setting forth his many truly national claims for consideration, and containing an interesting summary of his inventions (but unfortunately too long to reproduce here), more successful.
Trevithick was now verging upon sixty years of age, and found that he had to begin life anew. His first endeavour was to form a company to work his mines in Costa Rica, but neither he nor his friend Gerard could succeed in doing this either in England, in France, or in Holland; and, if the report be true that he refused a cheque for £8,000 for his share in the mine-grants, he must have lived to repent it bitterly. However, his busy brain was soon at work again with inventions. First an iron ship and a gun with friction-slides; then a recoil gun-carriage, in which he utilized the recoil somewhat after the manner since so effectually accomplished by Moncrieff; then we find him suggesting a mode of making ice by steam. Next he invents a chain-and-ball pump for draining the Dutch marshes; and, soon after, we hear of his being employed by the Government of that country to examine into sundry important engineering works which they had in hand, whilst poor Trevithick had to borrow £2 from a friend to enable him to get over to Holland for the purpose. It may be mentioned, to show what a good-natured fellow he was, that he at once gave 5s. out of this to a poor neighbour who had had the misfortune to lose his pig.
During a great part of this period of his life Trevithick was at Hayle Foundry, engaged in the construction of the great draining engines for Holland; but he, nevertheless, found time for further inventions, notably for applying tubular boilers, a superheating system, and surface-condensers to marine engines, to say nothing of his proposals to make the same water act over and over again by alternate expansion and contraction, so as to avoid the objectionable necessity for using salt water in the boilers. By his method marine engines occupied only half their former space; were half the weight; and consumed half the fuel that they formerly did: and it would scarcely be too much to say that his genius rendered the first voyage across the Atlantic practicable. In connexion with this subject, he took out his eighth and last patent in 1832.
Perhaps his latest project was as original—not to say Utopian—as any that even his fertile brain ever conceived. It was to erect a perforated, gilt, cast-iron column, 1,000 feet high, to commemorate the passing of the Reform Bill. One novel feature in it was the air-elevator, which worked in a tube in the centre of the column, and shot the traveller from the base to the summit, on arriving at which he was to secure a glorious bird's-eye view of London.
But the end was approaching. He had been in indifferent health in the spring of 1830; and, although his son does not state the causes of his father's death, there is too much ground to fear that poverty and misery at least accelerated it. He was at work in April, 1833, in Messrs. Hall's factory, at Dartford, Kent, probably on one of his marine engines, when, on the 22nd of that month, somewhat suddenly—for his relations knew nothing of his illness—the great engineer died. He was penniless, and was indebted to charity for his grave, and to the mechanics of Messrs. Hall's factory for becoming the bearers and the only mourners at his simple funeral.