After he had been working in Dartford for about a year, Trevithick was taken ill with pneumonia and had to retire to bed at the Bull Hotel, where he was lodging at the time. Following a week's confinement in bed he died on the morning of 22 April 1833.

Richard Trevithick, the visionary Cornish engineer who built the world's first high-pressure steam locomotive in 1804, lived a life of extraordinary brilliance followed by financial ruin. Despite his revolutionary inventions—including the "Puffing Devil" and the Cornish boiler—he was a poor businessman who struggled with patent disputes and bad investments. In 1816, he traveled to South America (Peru) to provide steam engines for silver mines, where he initially found success but was eventually caught up in the Peruvian War of Independence. He lost his fortune and spent years wandering through Central America, eventually being rescued from a swamp in Colombia by fellow engineer Robert Stephenson. He returned to England in 1827 penniless, finding that while his ideas had paved the way for the "Railway Age," others (like George Stephenson) had reaped the financial rewards. He died in poverty at the age of 62 on April 22, 1833, while working in Dartford, Kent. His colleagues had to take up a collection to pay for his funeral to prevent him from being buried in a pauper's grave, a tragic end for a man whose engineering genius literally set the modern world in motion.