The son of John Gurney, Goldsworthy Gurney received a good elementary education at the Truro Grammar School, and then studied medicine. He settled at Wadebridge as a surgeon, but although very successful, gradually turned his attention to scientific and mechanical investigations. He constructed an organ, studied chemistry and mechanical science, and removing to London in 1820, delivered a series of lectures on heat, electricity and gases at the Surrey Institute. His investigations resulted in the invention of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, and the discovery of the powerful lime-light known as the Drummond light, and he engaged in other experiments in this field of research. In 1804, while on a holiday at Camborne, he saw a Trevithick engine on wheels. Recalling this in after years he began experimenting on steam locomotion in 1823, and soon abandoned his surgical and medical practice for this new pursuit. His first efforts were toward the construction of an engine to travel on the common roads. The weight of the steam engines that were then being built seemed to him to offer great objections to their use for this purpose, but he succeeded, with his first machine, in reducing weight from four tons to thirty hundredweight. Then he secured a sufficiency of power by the invention of the high-pressure steam jet. This invention differed from those of Stephenson and Trevithick, who sent their waste steam up through the chimney instead of utilizing it. The Gurney jet was applied to the Stephenson Rocket engine on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, in October, 1829, and also to steamboats and steam carriages. In 1823, Gurney made his first experiments with a model steam carriage, on which propellers or feet were used. Two years later, in 1825, he completed a full-size carriage on the same plan, and in May of that year he took out his first patent for this vehicle. The carriage was impelled by these legs being alternately drawn forwards and pressed backwards by a steam engine acting upon them through movable oblong blocks, to which they were attached. As a first experiment this carriage was driven up Windmill Hill, near Kilburn. Another trip, between London and Edgeware, demonstrated the inefficiency of these propellers, and led to the discovery that there was sufficient friction between wheels and the ground to insure propulsion.