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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.
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