AN EXTRAORDINARY PIECE OF LEGISLATION
Indeed, notwithstanding legislative rebuffs, here and there an inventor kept up his experiments, and in 1861 the automobile had attained so much prominence as to be given parliamentary attention. Four years later, in 1865, an extraordinary law was passed which deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest monuments of legislative folly ever recorded in connection with an economic question. This law provided that, in the case of any locomotive moving on a public highway, the number of persons required to drive the engine should be increased to three, and that the vehicle should be preceded by a man with a red flag.
The latter provision suggests at first sight that the British legislator had here been moved to curiously un-British facetiousness; but there was really no such intent, as another provision of the law, limiting the maximum speed to four miles an hour, sufficiently testifies.
Other laws of similar tenor supported this one, and the validity of these decrees was finally sustained through an appeal to the Court of Queen's Bench, which brought forth the decision that the law applied to every type of self-propelled vehicle from the traction engine to the Bateman steam tricycle. Naturally this decision gave the quietus to automobile—or, to use the more English word, motor car—progress in Great Britain.
AN ENGLISH STEAM COACH OF 1827 AND A NEW YORK TAXICAB OF 1909.
The steam coach constructed in 1827 by Sir Goldsworthy Gurney was the prototype of several others which entered upon regular and successful service between various English cities, and which are said to have maintained an average speed of about 12 miles and a maximum speed of a little over 20 miles an hour. The above figure reproduced from a contemporary lithograph shows the carriage that operated between London and Bath. It weighed about 2 tons and carried six inside and 12 outside passengers.
It appears, then, that the idea of an automobile travelling on an ordinary highway preceded that of the locomotive railway. It was, indeed, by far the more natural idea of the two, since tramways were at that time but little used outside of collieries. And it seems scarcely open to doubt that the repressive legislation was directly responsible for deflecting the progress of mechanical invention away from what seemed the more natural direction of development. It is always hazardous in such a case to attempt to guess what might-have-been under different circumstances; but considering the practical results already achieved as early as 1824, one can scarcely avoid the conviction that had legislation favored, instead of opposing, the inventor, the automobile might have been developed in Great Britain as rapidly as railway traffic; in which event the middle of the nineteenth century would have seen the world at least as near the horseless age as we are in reality at the close of the first decade of the twentieth century. What this would have meant in its economic bearings on civilization during the past fifty years, the least imaginative reader can in some measure picture for himself.
In opposition to this view it might be urged that the real progress of the automobile has taken place since 1885, when the Daimler oil engine was substituted for the steam engine in connection with motor vehicles. But in reply to this it must be remembered that the workable gas engine had been invented as early as 1860, and that the Otto engine, of which the Daimler is a modification, was patented as early as 1876. These developments, it will be noted, took place at just about the time when the new interest in the automobile had been aroused, as evidenced by the repressive British legislation just referred to. It can be but little in question that had the early interest in the British automobile been maintained, inventive genius would long since have provided a suitable motor. There was no incentive for the English inventor during those long years when the automobile was under legislative ban; and in the meantime the idea of the highway automobile seems not to have taken possession of other nations.
When that idea did make its way, it was very soon put into tangible operation, as everybody knows. And the fact that England made no progress whatever in this line until the repressive laws were repealed in 1896, whereas France, Germany, and America had leaped far ahead in the meantime, is in itself demonstrative. Moreover, as regards the question of a motor for the automobile, it should not be forgotten that the steam-engine is by no means obsolete. The victories of Mr. Ross' machine at Ormonde in 1905, and of the Stanley steamer in 1906 (a mile in 28-1/5 seconds), show that steam is distinctly a factor, notwithstanding the popularity of the gasoline engine. The steam motor might have served an admirable purpose until such time as a better power had been developed.
However, it is futile to dwell on might-have-beens. Let us rather consider for a moment the spectacular development of the automobile with particular reference to its striking capacities as an eliminator of space.