Very tricky this week, the author has thrown in some cunning misdirection. Near as I can figure it, the answers are
1) William Bickford.
2) Tin
The two engineers are William Murdoch (b1754) and Richard Trevithick (b1771), which puts the location squarely in the Redruth and Camborne towns in Cornwall. The Guy who invented the safety fuse while living in the Camborne area was William Bickford. Now comes the tricky part, the author says he traveled in a Northwest direction though the back lanes to avoid a busy place but does he mean Newquay or St Ives? The riddle is solved when we consider which lighthouses he could have visited. The Trevose lighthouse, north of Newquay was not built in 1900, however, the Pendeen lighthouse was built in 1900 and is around 56 feet in height. This means that the writer was travelling in a southwesterly direction when he left Redruth/Camborne and visited the Pendeen lighthouse. The Levant mine and beam engine are located a few miles from there and the beam engine was installed c1840. The Levant mine is of course a tin mine, and the atomic number of tin is 50. Cornwall has stannery towns which were responsible for regulating the content of tin in coins, so this is the where the 'coinage' clue comes in.....
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