Showing The Harveys of Hayle: Engine-Builders, Shipwrights and Merchants of Cornwall by Edmund Vale

The first iron foundry in Cornwall was started in 1779 by an enterprising and versatile village blacksmith, John Harvey. His success encouraged him to enlarge his activities by acting as merchant to the mines, a venture which brought him into competition with powerful rivals who used every means to discourage and dislodge him, including physical violence. In 1803, John's last surviving son, Henry, was left heir to the foundry and the quarrel. Henry Harvey was one of the most striking figures thrown up by the Industrial Revolution. Far sighted, yet steady, exacting yet scrupulous and just, his character was the perfect foil for that of his brother-in-law, the mercurial mechanical genius, Richard Trevithick. The story closely follows the reaction of their sharply contrasted temperaments. The essential parts of Trevithick's first steam road-carriage, (1802) were made at John Harvey's foundry, thus conferring on Hayle the (doubtful) honour of being the birthplace of the automobile. Under Henry Harvey, the small foundry, on its once precarious foothold, expanded into a great engineering works which, by 1843, was engaged on building the largest steam engine in the world and had branched out into ship building and merchandising of many products. A whole new town was created and the firm of Harvey and Co continued as a major enterprise up till the time when the author ends his story in 1964.