Ups and Downs in Automotive Progress

As early as 1600, the Dutch, no strangers to wind power, had built a wind-powered, sail-mounted carriage. These carriages were reported to hold several passengers and move at speeds as high as twenty miles per hour. These tests were abandoned in favor of small windmills built onto the carriage, with mill vanes geared to the wheels. In either case, whether equipped with sails or windmills, they never caught on; mostly because they could not move except on the whim of a breeze. However, they were probably the first real land vehicles to move under power, other than that of animal or human muscle. While the Dutch dreamed in terms of the wind, others were thinking of other means of propulsion. In the 1700s, a Frenchman, Jacques de Vaucanson (no relation to the Roman god, Vulcan), built a vehicle which was powered by an engine based on the workings of a clock. What he neglected to calculate was that any clock which was capable of moving a vehicle with passengers would have to outweigh the load it was carrying. Even winding such a clock motor would take great time and greater effort than it was worth. Inventors in England, France, Germany and other countries worked on the idea of a compressed-air engine, but they were unable to find the solution to self-propulsion in this means. However, in their efforts, they contributed significant individual elements to the picture; elements like valves, pistons, cylinders, and connecting rods, and an emerging idea of how each of these elements related to the other. The first invention that can truly and logically be called an "automobile" was a heavy, three-wheeled, steam-driven, clumsy vehicle built in 1769 by Captain Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, a French Army engineer. (Cugat was actually born in Switzerland, but the French don't want to hear about it.) This mechanism was slow, ponderous, and only moved by fits and starts. In tests, it carried four passengers at a slow pace - a little over two miles per hour - and had to stop every twenty minutes to build a fresh head of steam. It was, however, a self-powered, steerable, wheeled, people transporter, thereby demonstrating that the idea of mobilization was workable. Unhappily, Cugot's superiors were not men of vision and failed to appreciate the potential of his creation. To show him how they really felt, they disallowed him any funds for further development and transferred him to other duties. Since they had paid good money for this contraption, however, they preserved the vehicle, and it can still be seen in the Paris museum, where it is displayed with proper national pride. In the meantime, Great Britain, who believed themselves to be the masters of steam, had begun to believe that they could put this same steam on wheels. It was probably natural that they believed this; Thomas Savery, an English engineer, had given the world its first steam engine in 1698. This engine was crude (by our standards), inefficient, and blew up at intervals. Thomas Newcomen, an English blacksmith in 1711, turned out a better, less dangerous version of the engine. Then, in 1679, James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker, had patented a truly improved steam engine that became widely used in British mills, mines, and factories. Sir Isaac Newton, in 1680, conceived of the idea of a carriage propelled by a "rearwardly directed jet of steam." (It didn't amount to much at the time, but Sir Isaac's concept has become the means of rearwardly directed jets to provide the thrust for rockets to probe space.) Then, in 1801, an engineer in Cornwall, Richard Trevithick, built a road steamer, which was first tested in a Christmas Eve snowfall. Two years later, he built an improved model with drive wheels ten feet in diameter, which proved to be capable of sustained, reliable performance at speeds up to twelve miles per hour. Others were also working on steam propulsion in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, and the United States. The Evans vehicle, the "oruktor amphibolos" referred to earlier, was thirty feet long and weighed fifteen tons. It was really intended for dredging the harbor and was the world's first amphibious conveyance. On it first run in 1804, it clanked along on huge iron wheels, frightening Philadelphia onlookers out of their skivvies, before entering the Schuylkill River, where its propulsive energy was converted to a stern paddle wheel. Another American inventor, Richard Dudgeon, was experimenting with steam-mobiles. One was destroyed in a fire in 1858 in the famous Crystal Palace in New York City; another, built about ten years later, was banned from the streets by the civic leaders. Britain actually was where the steamers made their greatest impact. By the 1830s, they had set up a limited network which provided both passenger and freight service to a handful of cities. The public was awed, amused, and sometimes bitter. Some complained that the road steamers were noisy, which they were; and some complained that they were dangerous, which was occasionally true. But, as is natural, the loudest complaints came from vested interests, horse-drawn vehicles and railroads, who were afraid of losing business. Because of the pressure, in 1865, the British Parliament adopted the "Red Flag Act," which limited steamers to a speed of four miles an hour on the open road and to two miles an hour in the city. It required a crew of three men: one walking sixty yards ahead, with a red flag by day and a lantern at night, to warn of the vehicle's approach. Stymied by these restrictions, several British engineers turned their thoughts and attention to electricity as a promising alternative to steam. One can imagine that the automobile may have progressed very differently if not for these restrictions. It takes courage to effect revolutionary changes of any kind, and there were some formidable tinkerers in the horse-drawn carriage, nineteenth century; men like William Murdock, William Henry James, William Symington, Sir Goldsworthy Gurney and Walter Hancock, Charles Dallery, Etienne Lenoir, Amedee Bollee-Pere, Siegfried Marcus, Thomas Blanchard, William Janes, Nathan Read, Apollos Kinsey, Sylvester Roper, Carl Benz, and Gottlieb Daimler.