But we have done with ’t, and we may call
The driving Jehu, Phaeton in his fall.
I wish to God, for these three kingdoms’ sake,
His neck, and not the whip, had giv’n the crack.”
Evelyn met with a similar mishap, but fortunately escaped injury. He, too, was accustomed to ride in Hyde Park, and on one occasion is grumbling that “every coach” there “was made to pay a shilling, and a horse sixpence, by a sordid fellow who had purchased it of the State, as they called it.”
Such experiments as were being made in this country were in the direction of a safer and swifter vehicle than those in general use. So early as 1625, one Edward Knapp had been granted a patent for “hanging the bodies of carriages on springs of steel.” Apparently Knapp was wholly unsuccessful, but forty years later Colonel Blunt, working upon similar lines, produced several carriages which, if not entirely satisfactory in themselves, led the way towards a wider appreciation of the problems in question. If, as seems probable, he was identical with the Blunt or Blount of Wicklemarsh, near Blackheath (afterwards Sir Harry Blount), who had travelled extensively in Turkey and elsewhere, it may be that he had brought back with him several continental curiosities. We hear, indeed, of a French chariot in his possession. In 1657 the Colonel was making experiments with a “way-wiser” or “adometer” which exactly “measured the miles ... showing these by an index as we went on. It had three circles, one pointing to the number of rods, another to the miles, by 10 to 1000, with all the subdivisions of quarters; very pretty,” opines Evelyn, “and useful.” This seems to have been the first instrument of the kind, and is overlooked by Beckmann in his account of such contrivances. The Colonel’s work was brought to the notice of the newly formed Royal Society, and a committee was formed to investigate it. The first model shown to this committee was of “a chariot with four springs, esteemed by him very easy both to the rider and the horse, and at the same time cheap.” The Committee also examined the designs of Dr. Robert Hooke, a distinguished member of the Society, and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, who “produced the model of a chariot with two wheels and short double springs to be driven by one horse; the chair of it being so fixed upon two springs that the person sitting just over or rather a little behind the axle-tree was, when the experiment was made at Colonel Blunt’s house, carried with as much ease as one could be in the French chariot without at all burthening the horse.”[29] Dr. Hooke showed “two drafts of this model having this circumstantial difference—one of these was contrived so that the boy sitting on a seat made for him behind the chair and guiding the reins over the top of it, drives the horse. The other by placing the chair behind and the saddle on the horse’s back being to be borne up by the shafts, that the boy riding on it and driving the horse should be little or no burden to the horse.”
The Colonel continued experimenting both with the older coaches and a new light chariot. In 1665 Mr. Pepys was taken to see an improvement of his on a coach.
“I met my Lord Brouncker, Sir Frederick Murrey, Dean Wilkins, and Mr. Hooke, going by coach to Colonel Blunt’s to dinner.... No extraordinary dinner, nor any other entertainment good; but afterwards to the tryal of some experiments about making of coaches easy. And several we tried; but one did prove mighty easy, not here for me to describe, but the whole body of the coach lies upon one long spring, and we all, one after another, rid in it; and it is very fine and likely to take.”
A few months later Pepys saw the new chariot itself.