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.
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.