So progress in the development of the horseless carriage lagged. It was twenty years after Evans’ Philadelphia exhibition when it was next heard from. Then the scene of operations shifted again to England.
In 1824, W. H. James, who had patented a water tube boiler for locomotives, built a passenger coach, of which each drive wheel was revolved by two cylinders receiving steam by means of a pipe from a boiler.
A pressure of 200 pounds of steam to the inch was maintained. The equivalent of differential action was supplied by independent application of power to the two drive wheels. The coach accommodated twenty persons. The contrivance ran satisfactorily on trials, and James secured financial backing and built another coach weighing 6,000 pounds which ran 12 to 15 miles an hour.
But the higher the rate of speed, the worse off the early automobile builder was. Although James equipped his coach with laminated steel springs, the road shocks and vibration stopped it every few miles. Steam joints and connections were broken as fast as they could be put together. The great need was a method of shock absorption, and either no one knew that this was the key to the problem, or, if it was realized, no one knew the remedy. So James failed to make the auto-coach a success, and died in the poorhouse.
A year after James built his first motor-coach in England—in 1825—Thomas Blanchard of Springfield, Mass., revived the horseless carriage subject which, in America, had been last experimented with by Oliver Evans in 1804.
Blanchard built a road vehicle that was one of the best produced up to that time. It was easy of manipulation and climbed hills successfully. Blanchard took out a patent on it, but when he started to find people who would buy a completed carriage he could discover none. Nobody wanted it. And so Blanchard’s efforts ceased.
At the time James was building his two coaches, and after Blanchard had given up trying to interest Americans in his invention, a Frenchman named Pecqueur was experimenting on phases of the auto-carriage. He discovered the principle of the “differential,” the balance mechanism which enables one wheel to revolve faster than the other in turning corners. He invented a planet gearing in this connection, which was the origin of the idea of the differential, and applied it to a steam wagon which he built in 1828. The differential of today is based on the principle discovered by Pecqueur.
While Pecqueur was evolving this invention, Goldsworthy Gurney in England made a car which was a practical failure in about everything except that it demonstrated that sufficient friction between the drive wheels and the road-bed could be created to produce propulsion. A trip of almost 200 miles from London and return was made in 1828 by Gurney in the second vehicle he built, in which the engine was concealed in the rear. His car made 12 miles an hour for part of the trip.
From this time—1828 to 1840—the automobile really had a vogue in England. A number of them were made and run as passenger carriers. For four months a motor carriage made the nine mile trip from Gloucester to Cheltenham four times a day. The “Infant” built by Walter Hancock made trips between London and Stratford. The “Era,” also made by Hancock, ran from London to Greenwich. To such an extent did the auto-bus business develop, that speed of 30 miles an hour was claimed, and one conveyance in 1834 ran over 1,700 miles without repairs or readjustment. At least, that was the claim made, and as a claim it has a familiar sound. The twentieth century automobile manufacturers who claim a run of so many thousand miles without repairs to this and that, have here a precedent for it that is as old as the industry.
But there was one feature about these early English motor busses that was their undoing. They weighed three tons and over, and the wheel rims were metal. The diameter of the wheels was six feet. The rubber tire was unthought of. The effect on roads of running a 3-ton, metal rimmed vehicle, carrying eleven to twenty passengers, was disastrous, and parliament, incited by horse owners and others, legislated them out of existence by making the toll charges prohibitive. Where the toll was $1 for horse drawn vehicles it was made $10 for steam auto buses. The consequence was that their manufacture and operation ceased about 1840.