The Irish Cyclist of Dec. 8 last, reviewing the National Show, says that “motor cycles are practically non-existent, the only specimen seen being a Bantam, with a rather neatly constructed oil engine ignited by electric spark, which was only exhibited last year.”
The Stanley Show, in the month previous, had a considerable display regarding which the London Cyclist said:
Three electric tandems have storage batteries carried in the frame below the top tube, with a motor in the lower part of the rear frame and on the handlebar a resistance coil to bring speed under control of the rear rider; a similar tandem has been run up to a speed of forty miles an hour, and these machines are for pacing purposes only. (This is emphasized by the recent arrival in New York of the two French professionals, brothers, with their electric tandem, booked to appear on several tracks. The tandem is credited with a fifty mile rate, and perhaps it may not be necessary for any little Michael to call out to the pacemakers on it to “hit it up.”) A road tandem has an oil motor with vertical double cylinders, the gear hub, of twelve inches outside diameter, serving as a fly wheel; the motor is of two and a half horse power and the maximum speed twenty-five miles an hour. A three-quarter-horse power oil motor tricycle is meant as tractor for a light two-seated two-wheeled chaise; the same parties showed phaetons and parcel vans. The Daimler Co., the first to enter England, showed a long line of vehicles with four-horse-power motors; one was a parcel van for the Cyclist publishers, and another was the Cyclist editor’s car on which he took his vacation journey of 2,000 miles to John-o-Groat’s and back to London. The review adds that the exhibit should convince of progress, for there was not a single English-built carriage in the collection, a year ago.
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.