Story of the automobile: Its history and development from 1760 to 1917 / With an analysis of the standing and prospects of the automobile industry

by H. L. Barber

Good Roads Industry’s Greatest Aid.

When the full effect of the work of good roads advocates is felt in this country, and regular appropriations are to be available in a regularly scheduled manner in most of the states, the biggest thing the automobile industry ever had to help it will have taken up its task in earnest. Less than ten per cent of the roads in this country are improved, say the good roads statisticians. One says that at least two-thirds of the reasons for present road developments are automobile reasons. When the proportion rises and the Lincoln Highway and scores of other long distance highways, intended to add to the cross country touring practice, are made into complete roads that make for genuine touring pleasure, the automobile industry will reap great benefits—more than the most enthusiastic ever dreamed would come from concrete, brick and other forms of specially prepared highways.

The war? Makers have varied opinions on the effect of the termination of the war in Europe. A majority have expressed the opinion that our exports of trucks and pleasure cars will take a big jump soon after peace is declared. But seeking for a peace after the years of warfare has become the least of the American auto maker’s trouble. Great war orders have been received and filled by the American makers of trucks. In 1914-15 the war orders rose to 14,000 trucks, as compared with only 784 in the season 1913-14. War orders still are being filled by some American truck makers, or were until the “ruthless submarine warfare” broke out anew, and after millions of dollars worth of the old models bought up in the United States and absorbed by the European powers had been swallowed in the mystery of the continent, United States truck makers began on later design models. In that way they are able to admit that the war has been a great blessing to the motor truck feature of the industry. “All a part of the great scheme of economics that makes for the approach of the complete automobilization of the country,” is the way one manufacturer puts it.

The automobile industry is set—it is fourth in importance in the United States. It will handle itself, so to speak. The makers know they must give value for every car and truck they build, and the people have become ready to continue in the industry every maker who plays the industry as it should be—not as a “game.”

CHAPTER II.
MECHANICAL EVOLUTION OF THE AUTOMOBILE.

The history of every advance toward greater perfection in the achievements of mankind, whether moral or physical, has been one of slow and laborious development.

We speak carelessly of the wonderful advance the automobile has made in a short time.

As a matter of fact, it has taken the automobile a hundred and fifty years to arrive mechanically at the point it has reached today.

We thought the development of the motor car was speedy, but we find that the measure of time required for its evolution, when put beside the span of human history, lengthens as the shadows grow longer in the dying day.

It is astonishing what stages this development has had to pass through, what problems have confronted it, and what apparently insuperable obstacles it has had to overcome.

In the light which our knowledge of the automobile now sheds on the present day mechanism of this invention, it is difficult for us to realize why these persistent struggles toward development of the mechanical ideas summoned to the aid of the inventors did not produce speedier results.

We can hardly conceive as we look upon the perfect limousine, skimming over the smooth asphalt with a motion that contains no more vibration than that in the glide of the expert ice skater, the crudeness, cumbersomeness and racking joltiness of its first forbear, which was the original expression of the mechanical idea involved in making wheels revolve by a motive power other than that exercised by man, the bullock or the horse.

If we want to relieve our minds of the strain of comprehending the difference between the automobile de luxe, as we of today know it, and the first automobile ever produced, and, by putting the two pictures side by side, span the period of the development of the art of automobile making, we must journey to Paris.

For, although internal combustion to drive a piston in a cylinder was produced with gun-powder in 1678 by Abbe D’Hautefeuille, and a carriage to be driven without the horse was a chaise propelled by human foot work, first conceived by John Vevers of England in 1769, there is no record that the two ideas were combined until it was done in France somewhere between 1760 and 1770.

The first automobile ever made was that produced by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, a Frenchman, and it is today on exhibition in the Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris.

There is no record of how Cugnot came to conceive the idea of his invention, but it is surmised that he had read about James Watt, in England, having discovered the principle of steam as motive power. This was about 1755.

The history of Watt’s experiments in applying steam to run engines does not, however, disclose that any engines he produced were ever seen by Cugnot, or that any adequate description of them was published at the time when Cugnot could have taken advantage of it.

So all we may actually know of Cugnot’s reasons for thinking he could make an “animalless” road vehicle is locked up in the rickety century-and-a-half-old Cugnot invention which we may see in the Paris Conservatory.

And what we would see would be:

An object which might make us laugh, did we not soberly reflect, in the light of our superior knowledge of today, that it was the first step in the long, laborious journey, extending over 157 years, that inventors had to travel to produce our luxurious limousine, our satisfying touring car and our terrifying speed demon of the oval racing course.

Cugnot’s body returned to dust 113 years ago, but his idea went marching on.

The visible expression of this idea which we can see in the Paris Conservatory is in the form of a tractor for a field gun, Cugnot having been a captain in the engineering corps of the French army.

The tractor has a single drive wheel actuated by two single acting brass cylinders, connected by an iron steam pipe with a round boiler of copper containing fire pot and chimneys.

Attached to this first motor-driven road vehicle is a wagon, on which it was Cugnot’a idea to have a field gun mounted.

On either side of the single drive wheel of this clumsy contrivance are located ratchet wheels. Pistons acting alternately on these ratchet wheels revolved the drive wheel in quarter revolutions.

For the copper boiler of this first motor car, additional water was needed after the machine had travelled a few feet, the exhaust of steam quickly leaving the boiler dry. The speed attained was very slow, by reason of the mechanical complications in transmitting power to the drive wheel. As for running smoothly, the machine wobbled, and bumped, and strained, and groaned, and finally ran into a wall. This was because it was overbalanced by its boiler and engine and had no steering gear.

Having run into a wall and been partially wrecked, that was the end of the forerunner of the automobile, except for its subsequent rescue from a junk heap and its installation in the Paris Conservatory; for, disheartened by what he regarded as his failure to make a successful steam-driven tractor to relieve men and other animals of the burden of transporting field guns, Cugnot turned his attention to devising a cavalry gun, at which he was so successful that when he died in 1804 he was enjoying a pension of 1,000 livres a year, given him by Napoleon.

Cugnot could not, of course, have visioned what his first crude automobile would develop into in the next century and a half. He probably never thought of a car holding seven passengers—much less of a speed for it of 60 miles an hour and more. In truth, since he abandoned his efforts, he probably concluded the obstacles in the way of even a practical fulfillment of his idea were insurmountable.

The one fact remains to keep company with the Cugnot motor tractor in the Conservatory of Paris, that Cugnot was the father of the idea out of which the automobile was evolved. He was the first to invent a motor-driven road vehicle.