This is a workman like biography of an eventful life (multiple inventions, failed money-making schemes, exploding boilers, hacking through the jungles of Costa Rica, near drownings, narrowly escaping being eaten by an alligator, etc. etc.) Richard Trevithick has gone down in history as an early exponent of high pressure steam and the builder of the first railway locomotive but as this book shows he was always coming up with new inventions and fresh business ideas that inevitably failed. Frequently I found myself desperately willing him to just stick with one or two ideas and follow them through to success (like his contemporary James Watt did) but inevitably Trevithick's difficult personality or circumstances beyond his control would intervene and he would be back to square one. Personally I would like to have had more diagrams and technical explanations of this inventions.