English Make Automobiles Almost Practicable.
The English people have an enviable record for successful mechanical inventions, and they were early experimenters on lines similar to those of Cugnot. About the time that Cugnot ran his machine into a wall, William Murdock, a mechanic, was working for Watt, the English inventor of steam. Whether he knew of Cugnot’s automobile attempt or not, there is no evidence extant. The idea of an engine-run road contrivance may have come to him through inspiration, or in some other way, as it did to Cugnot.
Murdock was quite familiar with Watt’s engines. He helped to build them, and he was curious to know the different forms in which they could be used, especially as to a road vehicle. He talked to Watt, but was sternly discouraged by the latter. Just as Cugnot, no doubt, concluded that his automobile would never get anywhere, Watt opposed applying his engine to a road travelling machine, because he was firmly convinced that no vehicle that could be invented could successfully negotiate, at a speed to make it worth while, the execrable roads of that day.
In this we have a fine illustration of the peculiarities and uncertain nature of the human mind. It is an organism that astounds by its perception of possibilities in one direction, while numb of any sensation whatever in glimpsing the possibilities in another direction.
Watt could invent steam, but he could not imagine good roads. Had he possessed the vision, he might have seen that roads, which he so abhorred as to see nothing good in them, would be reformed if he but encouraged applying his engines to road travelling mechanism.
In William Murdock’s way of taking the doleful discouragement of Watt, we see an illustration of that mental attitude that man has universally adopted in mechanical advance, toward the lugubrious prophet of failure. He has matched hope and optimism against despair and pessimism.
Despite Watt and his mournful views of the impossibility of building an engine-run road carriage that would advance over English roads, Murdock went ahead and built a model of an engine-run road carriage; but when he had it finished, Watt’s discouraging views prevailed, and Murdock did not attempt to enlarge his model to a full sized form. He stopped with the model, which is at the present day in the British Museum.
Murdock’s invention was tested, and the tests showed that an advance in efficiency over the creation of Cugnot had been made. The model was driven by a single cylinder of three inch bore. It had a one and a half inch stroke. A crank converted the reciprocating motion of the steam engine into rotary motion, the service performed in the Cugnot invention by the quarter revolution ratchet drive. Murdock’s idea was patented by a man named Pickard, in 1780.
The first automobile known to have been constructed and put on the road was built by Richard Trevithick at Camborne, England, in 1801. It was in the form of a stage coach, accommodating six or seven persons. The engine, boiler and firebox were at the rear. The engine was one of the first high pressure engines. A single cylinder motor was employed, and spur gear and crank axle were used to transmit the motion of the piston rod to the drive wheels.
With this coach Trevithick carried six or seven men over hills for a mile the first day of the trial. The second day it made six miles. Even with these performances, the invention’s impracticability must have been decreed, because it was not continued in operation.
Trevithick himself felt, no doubt, that it must be improved upon, for, in 1803, he built another contrivance driven by a horizontal single cylinder with 51⁄2-inch bore and a 30-inch stroke. But the driving wheels were ten feet in diameter. Fatal were these great clumsy wheels to popular approval of the invention, and no further advance was made. Trevithick had made one further step, and there the matter rested. He had developed the high pressure steam engine, and he had really made the first automobile, if such it could be called.