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.
America’s Early Efforts in Automobile Making.
Just as the English, represented by Murdock and Trevithick, were laboring on the steam propulsion idea, and France, in the person of Cugnot, was experimenting with it, so America was groping to find the solution. Cugnot’s activities began about 1760 and ended with his death in 1804. Trevithick’s period was from 1780 to 1803. The American experiments started about 1784. The man whom records show to have been the pioneer in practical excursions into the realm of carriages driven by steam, was Oliver Evans, born in Delaware but living in Philadelphia.
He developed the high pressure, non-condensing engine, although his only knowledge of steam was derived from reading what little was then printed about it, and his own discoveries. It appears as if Evans, who is known to have had knowledge of Cugnot’s construction of a road carriage, or, more properly speaking, a gun carriage, connected in his mind his engine with a road travelling vehicle, because in 1787, four years before Trevithick built his steam coach at Camborne, England, Evans secured a patent from the State of Maryland, giving him the exclusive right to make and use, within its borders, carriages propelled by steam.
That he immediately built a steam carriage in pursuance of this authority is doubtful. The only authentic record of an attempt is of one that he constructed in Philadelphia seven years later and under peculiar circumstances. It is likely that his act in securing the Maryland patent was done on the spur of a determination to build an automobile, but it was not immediately carried out. He went on perfecting steam engines up to 1804, when he accepted an order from the city of Philadelphia to build a steam flat boat for dock work.