Automobile Apathy Century Old.
Oliver Evans tried but was unable to get any one interested in developing his wagon run by an engine into an improved horseless carriage. The minds of that day regarded the practicability of his invention with as much skepticism as we would regard an invention to visit Mars, if exhibited in our day.
So Evans gave up any idea of improving his self-running wagon, became busy with an ironfoundry which people could understand, and died rich.
There was a measure of justification for the lack of popular imagination and vision toward the automobile in both England and America when the first samples appeared. They were slow, noisy, erratic in performance, and positively dangerous—threatening explosions, collisions, and all sorts of dire things—and it was natural that people should predict their failure.
So progress in the development of the horseless carriage lagged. It was twenty years after Evans’ Philadelphia exhibition when it was next heard from. Then the scene of operations shifted again to England.
In 1824, W. H. James, who had patented a water tube boiler for locomotives, built a passenger coach, of which each drive wheel was revolved by two cylinders receiving steam by means of a pipe from a boiler.
A pressure of 200 pounds of steam to the inch was maintained. The equivalent of differential action was supplied by independent application of power to the two drive wheels. The coach accommodated twenty persons. The contrivance ran satisfactorily on trials, and James secured financial backing and built another coach weighing 6,000 pounds which ran 12 to 15 miles an hour.
But the higher the rate of speed, the worse off the early automobile builder was. Although James equipped his coach with laminated steel springs, the road shocks and vibration stopped it every few miles. Steam joints and connections were broken as fast as they could be put together. The great need was a method of shock absorption, and either no one knew that this was the key to the problem, or, if it was realized, no one knew the remedy. So James failed to make the auto-coach a success, and died in the poorhouse.
A year after James built his first motor-coach in England—in 1825—Thomas Blanchard of Springfield, Mass., revived the horseless carriage subject which, in America, had been last experimented with by Oliver Evans in 1804.
Blanchard built a road vehicle that was one of the best produced up to that time. It was easy of manipulation and climbed hills successfully. Blanchard took out a patent on it, but when he started to find people who would buy a completed carriage he could discover none. Nobody wanted it. And so Blanchard’s efforts ceased.
At the time James was building his two coaches, and after Blanchard had given up trying to interest Americans in his invention, a Frenchman named Pecqueur was experimentingon phases of the auto-carriage. He discovered the principle of the “differential,” the balance mechanism which enables one wheel to revolve faster than the other in turning corners. He invented a planet gearing in this connection, which was the origin of the idea of the differential, and applied it to a steam wagon which he built in 1828. The differential of today is based on the principle discovered by Pecqueur.
While Pecqueur was evolving this invention, Goldsworthy Gurney in England made a car which was a practical failure in about everything except that it demonstrated that sufficient friction between the drive wheels and the road-bed could be created to produce propulsion. A trip of almost 200 miles from London and return was made in 1828 by Gurney in the second vehicle he built, in which the engine was concealed in the rear. His car made 12 miles an hour for part of the trip.
From this time—1828 to 1840—the automobile really had a vogue in England. A number of them were made and run as passenger carriers. For four months a motor carriage made the nine mile trip from Gloucester to Cheltenham four times a day. The “Infant” built by Walter Hancock made trips between London and Stratford. The “Era,” also made by Hancock, ran from London to Greenwich. To such an extentdid the auto-bus business develop, that speed of 30 miles an hour was claimed, and one conveyance in 1834 ran over 1,700 miles without repairs or readjustment. At least, that was the claim made, and as a claim it has a familiar sound. The twentieth century automobile manufacturers who claim a run of so many thousand miles without repairs to this and that, have here a precedent for it that is as old as the industry.
But there was one feature about these early English motor busses that was their undoing. They weighed three tons and over, and the wheel rims were metal. The diameter of the wheels was six feet. The rubber tire was unthought of. The effect on roads of running a 3-ton, metal rimmed vehicle, carrying eleven to twenty passengers, was disastrous, and parliament, incited by horse owners and others, legislated them out of existence by making the toll charges prohibitive. Where the toll was $1 for horse drawn vehicles it was made $10 for steam auto buses. The consequence was that their manufacture and operation ceased about 1840.
In 1878 Bollee built a steam omnibus which ran between Paris and Vienna, making 22 miles an hour. In this car was reached the highest efficiency the art had attained up to that time. Practically an identical car was built in 1880by Bollee, which was entered by him 15 years later and won honors in the Paris-Bordeaux race.
In 1879 the automobile development germ returned to America.
In this brief sketch showing the struggle of auto-mechanism to advance, from the very first inspiration of Cugnot about 1770, we must be impressed by the determination with which the idea of auto-mechanical perfection persisted. This persistence was so determined in the face of all obstacles and opposition that it is almost eerie.
It was just as if some force of nature was struggling to break through the crust of man’s consciousness. Or shall we credit it to man, and say, rather, that it was man’s mind that was the impelling force in the persistent attempts to read a mechanical riddle?
Whatever the impelling force, whether man or nature, man heeded its behests and continued his efforts.
In 1879 an American did a thing which has had much to do with giving the United States its long delayed start in the automobile industry. This man was George B. Selden of Rochester, N. Y. He applied for the first patent for the gasoline motor, as the driving force of a road vehicle. This was before any automobilehad been equipped with an internal combustion hydro-carbon motor. This motor had, however, been in use for some time in running stationary engines.
The bicycle had, at that time, been an acknowledged success, and in considerable use for seven or eight years, and had had a great deal of influence in improving roads. Better roads caused people to look more favorably on the possibilities of the motor vehicle.
Selden built a gasoline motor under the specifications contained in his application for a patent, and it performed satisfactorily in experiments. But he did not build an automobile containing the gasoline motor. He did not secure his patent until 1895, 16 years after he had made application for it.
In those sixteen years he was endeavoring to interest capital, while at the same time he was perfecting his motor. While the use of bicycles had improved roads and this improvement caused a more favorable popular view of the possibility that automobiles might be made successfully, a new motive power appeared on the horizon just at this time.
It was electricity. It was in 1890, eleven years after Selden had applied for a patent for a gasoline motor, and while he was still wrestling with the problem of getting capital to aidhim, that reports that the storage battery had been more nearly perfected became rife.
Men to whom Selden went for financial aid feared that even if the gasoline motor was feasible, it might be overshadowed by the storage battery, and held off. Selden even went abroad to raise money, but had no more success there than here.
Although an inventor and a skilled mechanic, Selden lacked salesmanship ability. He was handicapped by impatience and irascibility, and his predictions of the success of his gasoline motor, its general adoption, and the extent to which automobiles would in the future be used, were regarded by people with whom he talked as so extravagant that they bluntly declared he was crazy, and avoided him.
He had proceeded so far on one occasion in interesting a Rochester business man, that he had him in his store and was on the point of getting him to put up $5,000, when he made a simple remark that completely “spilled the beans.”
He said: “Jim, you and I will live to see more carriages on Main Street run by motor than are now drawn by horses.”
The prospective investor looked at Selden for half a minute, and came to a conclusion expressed in these words:
“George, you are crazy, and I won’t have anything to do with your scheme,” and with this ultimatum the man stalked out of the store.
Twenty-five years later this man met Selden, and, extending his hand, said: “Well, George, you were right years ago when you said there would be more automobiles in Main Street than horses.”
But Selden ignored the man’s extended hand, and with passion thrilling in his tones said: “Yes, and I wasn’t so —— crazy as you and the other fools said I was,” and walked off. And he never spoke to the man afterward.
Selden’s patent could have been issued any time within the sixteen years that he let it lie dormant. He kept the application alive at the patent office by legitimate methods, and his reason for not bringing the matter to a head was that at no time in those sixteen years was he ready to manufacture under it, and he put off the actual issuance until such time as he was prepared to take full advantage of the privileges it conferred.
He was alive to the fact that the years of a patent are numbered, and he aimed to time the issue so that the patent would not expire before he could derive the benefits from it.
It was in 1895 that the patent was issued, andin 1900 Selden disposed of it to the Electric Vehicle Company of New Jersey.
In the meantime, the development of electric motor vehicles had begun, and in 1885, Benz, a German, built the first road vehicle to be run by the internal-combustion, hydro-carbon motor. It was a tricycle, and its motor was single-cylindered, four-cycled, after the type of an engine developed in 1876, in Germany, by Otto, and water cooled. It had electric ignition and a mechanical carburetor. Benz secured a patent in 1886 on his invention and it ran successfully, making ten miles an hour. Benz was limited to the use of certain streets in Mannheim, Germany, for running his machine, out of deference to the tendency to nerves of horses and their drivers or riders. This tricycle by Benz was the forerunner of the Benz automobile. This is one of the most successful and popular cars in Germany—and before the war, in all Europe. The first automobile imported into the United States was a Benz car brought to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Up to 1917 the Benz car was an entrant in most automobile speed contests.
While Benz was perfecting the gasoline motor in its attachment to the tricycle, Gottlieb Daimler, another German, was producing, in 1885, the motor-cycle. Daimler had devoted himselfsedulously to the problem of reducing the weight and increasing the power of the gas engine, in order to adapt it to high efficiency road vehicles. He invented the hot tube ignition to take the place of ignition by flame. By regulation of the heat of the tube, the compressed charge of hydro-carbon vapor could be fired automatically at a specific point in the cycle. Through the increased speed thus produced the size and weight of the motor could be reduced.
The Daimler motor was a big step in advance, as was proved by the supremacy which the German and French automobile makers at once attained. The French secured rights to the Daimler motor and operated under them with such success that from 1889 to 1894, before the United States had really waked up to motor car making, they were beginning to put out gasoline automobiles successfully.