The background for those not familiar with the early history of modern Andea:
In 1813 the Cornish Engineer Richard Trevithick set off for Peru at the behest of local mine managers. They'd bought his pressure steam engines to pump their mines and wanted him to come along and oversee their expansion. Trevithick had been an early experimenter with mobile steam engines in England between 1804 and 1811 and although had not managed to create a working railway system at home, in Peru all the elements came together.
The explosion of early railway construction in Peru, aided by a visit from early railway pioneer George Stephenson in the 1820s, really kick-started the industrial revolution that shaped modern South America.
My question is what would have happened if Trevithick hadn't succeeded in his railway and mining engineering there and just gone home in debt?
I had a couple of ideas:
In 1813 the Cornish Engineer Richard Trevithick set off for Peru at the behest of local mine managers. They'd bought his pressure steam engines to pump their mines and wanted him to come along and oversee their expansion. Trevithick had been an early experimenter with mobile steam engines in England between 1804 and 1811 and although had not managed to create a working railway system at home, in Peru all the elements came together.
The explosion of early railway construction in Peru, aided by a visit from early railway pioneer George Stephenson in the 1820s, really kick-started the industrial revolution that shaped modern South America.
My question is what would have happened if Trevithick hadn't succeeded in his railway and mining engineering there and just gone home in debt?
I had a couple of ideas:
- Maybe we wouldn't have seen Peru expand into the Southern Pacific powerhouse it became by the 1900s, incorporating Bolivia and parts of Chile to become Andea?
- Surely we wouldn't have seen the Trevithick Dynasty come to have such huge influence in the Americas in politics, economics, and culture?
- Would British financial interests in South American railways instead have been directed to the USA?