CHAPTER II.

EARLY EXAMPLES OF STEAM ROAD CARRIAGES.

THE three principal sources of energy at present in use for the propulsion of vehicles upon common roads are steam, oil, and electricity, and of these there is no question, at least in the author's mind, as to the superiority of the first for general purposes.

There can indeed be little doubt but that the vast majority of people would prefer a smooth-running reliable steam-engine for use as the propelling medium of a pleasure or light business carriage to the evil-smelling, dangerous, wasteful, and at best uncertain and unreliable oil motors heretofore chiefly employed for that purpose in motor cars of recent construction. Therefore until such time as a completely odourless, (waste) vapourless oil engine has been produced, and until the erratic starting of these motors has been cured, and the necessity for maintaining the said motors constantly running, even whilst the vehicles are stationary, has been eliminated, the oil motor cannot claim to be suitable for the purpose of pleasure and other light vehicles, or for any in crowded thoroughfares.

On the other hand, turning to the true and legitimate field of mechanical locomotion on the public roads, which is obviously that of the conveyance of

comparatively heavy loads of passengers and goods, and probable successful competition with light railways for opening up remote districts, oil motors and electricity are evidently entirely out of the question, and the steam-engine is undoubtedly the only practical source of energy at present available.

It is not proposed in this little work to follow step by step the experiments that have been made in the application of steam power to the propulsion of carriages upon common roads since its first inception over a hundred years ago. The space at disposal is, as has been already mentioned, extremely limited, and consequently any lengthy descriptions of the principal of these earlier attempts, or indeed any mention at all of many of them, would only result in the crowding out of far more interesting matter of more recent date. This portion of the description will therefore have to be confined to a very brief sketch of the more important early types of steam motor carriages adapted for use on common roads.

The first power used for propelling carriages was naturally the steam-engine, and although oil engines have seemingly produced more satisfactory results as the motive power on light carriages of recent construction, there can be but little doubt in the mind of any thinking engineer that the first named will yet prove itself to be equal if not superior to any other form for all classes of power-propelled vehicles.

Authorities differ as to whom the honour is due of having first suggested the use of a steam-engine for the purpose of propelling carriages on common roads. Savery is said to have sufficiently indicated that he considered such a use possible; but, however

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From this attempt for a period of about thirty years the subject was left in abeyance, no further experiments, or at least none worth recording, having been made, until those of Griffiths, Brunel, Gurney, and Hancock, when steam-carriages constructed by these inventors were run for some time in different parts of England and Scotland with considerable success as far as the mechanism was concerned, but failed to prove profitable as commercial undertakings, chiefly, no doubt, owing to the heavy tolls which were levied upon them, and to the obstructions that were everywhere thrown in their way, their very success as practical mechanical contrivances having raised up a host of enemies against them.

Gurney's Steam Road Carriage.

One of Gurney's engines, which weighed only 2 tons, is said to have drawn with ease a load of 11 tons upon a good hard country road. It had tyres 3 inches in width on the driving wheels. Gurney in his steamcoaches drove direct on to a cranked axle carrying the driving wheels, which were the rear ones, and he placed his cylinders horizontally.

For raising the requisite supply of steam he employed a generator consisting of two horizontal drums. connected by a series of tubes bent into a horse-shoe shape, and so placed that the lower arms formed the fire-bars and supported the fire. A third larger drum, placed vertically above the other two constituted the steam space

The steering was effected by means of a fifth wheel through which the fore carriage was controlled, this

that may be, in a patent taken out by Watt in 1784, a description of the application of a steam-engine to the propulsion of road carriages is to be found, an idea which was doubtless the outcome of a suggestion made to him by Dr Robinson, who likewise first directed his attention to the steam-engine. This is probably the first authentic record—at least in this country-of a power-propelled road carriage, and it was speedily followed by the construction in 1786 by Murdoch, Watt's assistant, of a steam-carriage which was run upon the high-road near Redruth, Cornwall. In this same year also a working model of a steamcarriage was constructed by William Symington, the reputed inventor of the steamboat, to whom the idea most probably first occurred about the same time as to Watt; and Oliver Evans, an American inventor, likewise constructed a working model of such a vehicle about this time. Some years later (1802) further experiments with a steam-carriage were made by Trevethick and Vivian, but the wretched state in which the so-called main roads were then kept in this country, the opposition of the turnpike managers, and most probably still more the attraction of all enterprise and capital to the improvement of railways, the introduction of which had then commenced, seemed to have stopped further attempts in this direction at that period. Trevethick and Vivian's patent, dated in 1802, comprised a high-pressure steamengine, to be used to propel a carriage or waggon, which engine was of particularly ingenious construction, and although of so early a date possessed details which, somewhat modified, were to be found in highpressure steam-engines of comparatively recent times.