Thomas Shaw Brandreth

Thomas Shaw Brandreth (1788–1873) was a British barrister, inventor, and director of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway who entered Cycloped in the 1829 Rainhill Trials — a horse-powered vehicle in which a horse walking on a treadmill drove the wheels through a leather belt — representing the last attempt at the trials to demonstrate that animal power could compete with steam locomotion on a commercial railway.

Born at Liverpool on 24 July 1788, Brandreth was educated at Trinity College Cambridge and called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, practising as a barrister while pursuing his interests in engineering and invention. His position as a director of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway gave him access to the Rainhill Trials, and Cycloped — whatever its merits as a mechanical curiosity — reflected the genuine uncertainty still felt by some railway promoters about whether steam traction was necessarily superior to horse power on a properly engineered gradient.

Cycloped achieved around 5 mph in preliminary trials but was disqualified before the formal competition on the grounds that it was not steam-powered, the trial conditions having specified a self-propelled locomotive. The result of the Rainhill Trials, and the subsequent commercial success of Rocket and its successors, settled definitively that steam traction would power the railways. Brandreth continued his engineering interests, took out various patents, and died at Worthing on 27 May 1873.