THE STEAM CARRIAGE.
MOTOR TRICYCLE.
The motor itself is the primary factor in the problem, and seems to be the most difficult. Naturally, steam was the first power tried, as it is the oldest known of the artificially-produced powers. As tried on the highway, it far antedates the railroad locomotive. In 1797, the Frenchman Cugnot produced a three-wheeled steam wagon in Paris, which ran fairly well until an accident befel it. In the thirties, several steam wagons ran for passenger service in and near London, and on one line 10,000 passengers were carried a total distance of some 4,000 miles. Most of these vehicles did not do both the carrying and driving but used a road locomotive to draw a ’bus. In 1870, a ’bus was built in Edinburgh with solid rubber tires, capable of carrying a load of sixty passengers, but the attempt was not commercially successful. Not long after, several vehicles capable of carrying a hundred persons at a speed from three to ten miles an hour were made and sent to India.
There are a number of builders of steam automobiles in Paris, and a considerable number of the vehicles are now in use in the gay capital, mostly for such heavy work as carrying passengers and delivering goods. There are comparatively few in England; yet a London insurance journal of Dec. 22 reports a trial trip of the steam van experimentally adopted by the postoffice and intended to run between London and Red Hill. The particular machine referred to is an old one which had already done about 4,500 miles, “and has been repainted for this purpose; those specially built for the G. P. O. will be rather different in arrangement although not differing in principle. The machinery, which has a petroleum fire, seems to be thoroughly under control, the brake very powerful and the wheels fitted with solid rubber tires; it is probable that new vans may have the advantage of Foidart’s patent ball bearings, which are in the hands of the British Ball-Bearing Syndicate.”
It may be a hint that oil is taken as fuel on the London postal vans, and also that one of the wagons above mentioned did not exceed in weight that of the heaviest electric phaetons now running with storage batteries; and although steam hardly seems likely to be employed on carriages for strictly private use it might be too much to predict that the steam motor has no chance as against the others. A carriage has lately been finished, by the way, by a mechanical engineer in Rochester, N. Y., working by steam, generated by gasoline in some manner, as reported, one charge of gasoline serving for twenty miles.