NOTED INVESTIGATORS
Simon Stevin
Born in Bruges, Holland, in 1548. Died in 1620.
Stevin was a noted mathematician, and also experimented in the construction of wheel vehicles about 1600. He built in his workshop at The Hague a wheeled vehicle that was propelled by sails. This was simply a tray or boat of wood, which hung close to the ground. It was borne on four wooden wheels, each one of which was five feet in diameter, and the after-axle was pivoted to form a rudder. A tall mast was carried amidships, and there was a small foremast that was stayed aft. Large square sails were carried on these masts. A trial trip of this sailing ship on land was made in 1600, when the journey from Scheveningen to Petten, a distance of forty-two miles, was made in about two hours. On this occasion some twenty-two passengers were carried. Prince Maurice of Holland steered, and among the passengers were Grotius, and the Spanish Admiral, Mendoza, who was then a prisoner of war in Holland.
Stevin also built a smaller sail vehicle, similar to the one just described, that carried from five to eight persons. Both carriages were used a great deal, running many miles on the Dutch coast. The smaller one was to be seen at Scheveningen as late as 1802. Grotius wrote a poem on these carriages. Bishop Wilkens, in England, also wrote about them in 1648, and showed a drawing that was made from a description given to him by those who had seen the car at work. Howell, a writer of the period, thus quaintly described the Stevin carriage: “This engine, that hath wheels and sails, will hold above twenty people, and goes with the wind, being drawn or moved by nothing else, and will run, the wind being good and the sails hois’d up, about fifteen miles an hour upon the even hard sands.”
Thomas Wildgosse
In 1618, Thomas Wildgosse got out a patent for “newe, apte, of compendious formes or kinds of engines or instruments to ploughe grounds without horse or oxen; and to make boates for the carryage of burthens and passengers runn upon the water as swifte in calmes, and more safe in stormes, than boats full sayled in great wynnes.” It is agreed by the best authorities that these vehicles were set in motion by gear worked by the hand of a driver, although Fletcher thinks that steam engines were intended. Additional patents were granted to Wildgosse in 1625.
David Ramsey
Associated with Thomas Wildgosse in his experimenting and patenting, in 1618, was David Ramsey, who at that time was Page of the Bed Chamber to James I. of England, and afterwards was Groom of the Privy Chamber to the same monarch. In 1644, Ramsey was again a partner in the grant of a patent for “a farre more easie and better waye for soweing of corne and grayne, and alsoe for the carrying of coaches, carts, drayes, and other things goeing on wheels, than ever yet was used and discovered.” This may have been a manually or a steam propelled vehicle. It is most reasonable to suppose that it was the former.
Johann Hautsch
Born in 1595. Died in 1670.
Hautsch was a noted mathematician, and, experimenting in the construction of road vehicles, he built a mechanical carriage for use on common roads. This carriage was successfully run in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1649, and thereafter attracted a great deal of attention. It was propelled by a train of gears that turned the axle, being operated by two men who, secreted in the interior of the body, worked cranks. The finish of the body of this coach was very elaborate, being heavily carved and having fashioned in front the figure of a dragon, arranged to roll its eyes and spout steam and water, in order to terrify the populace and clear the way. On each side of the body were carved angels holding trumpets, which were constantly blown, the precursors, perhaps, of the automobile horns of to-day. The Hautsch coach was said to have gone as rapidly as one thousand paces an hour. One of the carriages which he built was sold to the Crown Prince of Sweden, and another to the King of Denmark. Not much more is known of the Hautsch vehicles, but it is a matter of record that the inventor was preceded by one whose name is unknown, but who ran a coach, mechanically propelled somewhat like this car, in January, 1447, near Nuremberg.
Christiaan Huygens
Born at The Hague, Holland, April 14, 1629. Died at The Hague, June 8, 1695.
Huygens received a good education, and at early age showed a singular aptitude for mathematics. Soon after he was sixteen years of age he prepared papers on mathematical subjects that gave him pre-eminent distinction. He became noted as a physicist, astronomer and mathematician. He devoted some time to the consideration of improvements in road vehicular travel.
Stephen Farfluer
Born in 1663.
Farfluer was a contemporary of Johann Hautsch, and was a skillful mechanician of Altderfanar, Nuremberg, Germany. About 1650 he made a dirigible vehicle propelled by man power, but as distinguished from that of his rival, Hautsch, this was a small carriage, being calculated only for one person. Being crippled, Farfluer used the wagon as his only means of getting about alone. It had hand cranks that drove the single front wheel by gears.
Fernando Verbiest
Born near Courtrai, Belgium, 1623. Died in China in 1688.
Verbiest became a Jesuit missionary, and was a man of marked ability. After going to China he acquired a thorough knowledge of the language of that country, where he spent the greater part of his life. Under his Chinese name he wrote scientific and theological works in Chinese. He was appointed astronomer at the Pekin observatory, undertook the reformation of the Chinese calendar, superintended the cannon foundries, and was a great favorite of the Emperor.
About 1655 he made a small model of a steam carriage. This is described in the English edition of Huc’s Christianity in China, in Muirhead’s Life of James Watt, and in the Astronomia Europia, a work that is attributed to Verbiest, but was probably compiled from his works by another Jesuit priest and was published in Europe in 1689. The Verbiest model was for a four-wheeled carriage, on which an aeolipile was mounted with a pan of burning coals beneath it. A jet of steam from the aeolipile impinged upon the vanes of a wheel on a vertical axle, the lower end of the spindle being geared to the front axle. An additional wheel, larger than the supporting wheels, was mounted on an adjustable arm in a manner to adapt the vehicle to moving in a circular path. Another orifice in the aeolipile was fitted with a reed, so that the steam going through it imitated the song of a bird.
Isaac Newton
Born at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England, December 25, 1642. Died at Kensington, March 20, 1727.
Isaac Newton, who became one of the greatest mathematicians that the world ever knew, was the son of a farmer. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in his early youth he mastered the principles of mathematics, as then known, and began original investigations to discover new methods. His great achievement was the discovery of the law of universal gravitation, but his genius was active in other directions, as the investigation of the nature of light, the construction of improved telescopes, and so on. He was a Member of Parliament in 1689 and 1701, and master of the mint, a lucrative position, from 1696 until the time of his death. In 1671 he was elected a member of the Royal Society, and was annually chosen to be its president, from 1703 until his death.
Newton was one of the first Englishmen to conceive the idea of the propulsion of vehicles by the power of steam. Taking up for consideration Hero’s hollow ball filled with water from which steam was generated by the outward application of heat, he added these conclusions: “We have a more sensible effect of the elasticity of vapors if the hole be made bigger and stopped, and then the ball be laid upon the fire till the water boils violently; after this, if the ball be set upon little wheels, so as to move easily upon a horizontal plane, and the hole be opened, the vapors will rush out violently one way, and the wheels and the ball at the same time will be carried the contrary way.” Beyond this philosophical suggestion, however, Newton never went. The steam carriage attributed to him by some writers is merely an imaginative creation, by writer or artist, based upon the above proposition.
Vegelius
A professor at Jena, Saxony, in the seventeenth century, Vegelius constructed, in 1679, a mechanical horse, which was propelled by springs and cased in the skin of a real horse. This machine is said to have traveled four German miles an hour.
Elié Richard
Born on the Island of Ré in 1645.
A physician of La Rochelle, France, Elié Richard was a man of science, and a considerable celebrity in his day. He had built, in 1690, a dirigible vehicle that he used to travel about in on his professional work. The carriage was propelled by mechanism operated by a man-servant by means of a treadle. The operator was placed on the rear of the carriage, and the occupant, seated in front, steered by a winch attached to a small wheel. This construction was frequently referred to by contemporaries of Richard, and even later on, and was copied by others during the following hundred years or so.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz
Born at Leipsic, Germany, July 6, 1646. Died at Hanover, November 14, 1716.
Leibnitz, in addition to his work as a philosopher and mathematician, was also interested in mechanics. He gave some attention to the study of the possibility of making improvements in common road vehicles, and he endeavored to encourage, though without results, his contemporary, Denis Papin.
Humphrey Mackworth
Born in 1647. Died in 1727.
A celebrated English politician and capitalist, Sir Humphrey Mackworth matriculated at Magdalene College, Oxford, December 11, 1674. He was entered at the Middle Temple, in June, 1675, and called to the bar in 1682. In 1695 he was engaged in developing collieries and copper and smelting works at Melencryddan, near Neath, Wales, and the improvements introduced by him there were of the greatest value. Among other improvements he constructed a wagon-way from the mines, and propelled his coal-carrying cars by sails.
Denis Papin
Born at Bloys, France, August 22, 1647. Died in England, 1712.
Papin was a son and nephew of a physician. He studied medicine in Paris and practiced for some time, attaining distinction in his profession. A passion for the sciences, mathematics and physics drew him away from medical practice and he became skillful in other lines. He followed assiduously the footsteps of Huygens and in some respects became a rival of his master in original thought and experimenting and in professional attainments.
Papin invented in 1698 a carriage that was fitted with a steam engine as such is now understood; that is, a cylinder and a piston. This was probably the first vehicle of its kind known in Europe. The construction was a model merely, a toy which ran around the room, but it is said to have worked well. Concerning this invention, Papin said: “I believe that one might use this invention for other things besides raising water. I have made a little model of a carriage that is propelled by this force. I have in mind what I can do, but I believe that the unevenness and turns of the highway will make this invention very difficult to perfect for carriages or road use.” Although encouraged to prosecute his work by the Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, his doubts could not be overcome in regard to the practicability of his proposed carriage. He still claimed, however, that by the aid of such vehicles, infantry could probably be moved as quickly as cavalry and without the necessity of heavy impedimenta of food and other supplies.
Vaucauson
A celebrated French mechanician, Vaucauson, in April, 1740, built a vehicle “to go without horses.” He was visited at his palace in Rue Charonne, Paris, by King Louis Fifteenth, and the exhibition of this vehicle, which, according to reports, was propelled by a “simple watch spring,” was reviewed in a journal of the time as follows:
“Yesterday, at 3 p.m. His Majesty, accompanied by several officers and high court functionaries, repaired to the palace of M. Vaucauson and took his seat on a species of throne specially prepared for his reception on a raised platform, whence he could clearly discern all the mechanism of the carriage in its gyrations through the avenues and alleys. The vehicle would seat two persons, and was painted scarlet, bordered in blue, ornamented with much gilding; the axle trees of the wheels were provided with brakes and set in motion by a fifth wheel, likewise well braked and bound with long ribbons of indented steel. Two chains communicated with a revolving lever in the hands of the conductor, who could at will start or stop the carriage without need of horses. His Majesty congratulated the skillful mechanician, ordering from him for his own use a similar vehicle to grace the royal stables. The Duke of Montemar, the Baron of Avenac and the Count of Bauzun, who had witnessed the trial, were unable to credit their own vision, so marvelous did the invention appear to them. Nevertheless, several members of the French Academy united in declaring that such a piece of mechanism could never circulate freely through the streets of any city.”
Either from royal forgetfulness or thanks to the customary court intrigues to turn His Majesty from his purpose, or possibly because of the somewhat crude nature of the invention itself, the fact is that from that time forth not the slightest mention is to be found in history of the motor carriage of Vaucauson.
Robinson
It is on the authority of James Watt that Dr. Robinson is credited with having conceived the idea of driving carriages by steam power. Watt wrote as follows:
“My attention was first directed to the subject of steam engines by the late Dr. Robinson, then a student in the University of Glasgow, afterwards Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He, in 1759, threw out the idea of applying the power of the steam engine to the moving of wheel carriages, and to other purposes, but the scheme was soon abandoned on his going abroad.”
Erasmus Darwin
Born at Elton, Nottinghamshire, England, December 12, 1731. Died at Derby, April 18, 1802.
Having studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at Edinburgh, Darwin settled as a physician at Litchfield and gained a large practice. In 1781 he moved to Derby. He was a man of remarkable scientific attainments and a voluminous writer of poetry that was pervaded by enthusiasm and love of nature, but had little poetic quality.
Darwin, wrote most of his poetry and evolved most of his ideas as he drove about the country in a doctor’s covered sulky that was piled high with books and writing materials. He was in correspondence with Benjamin Franklin and Matthew Boulton about 1765 in regard to steam, and writing to Boulton, said: “As I was riding home yesterday I considered the scheme of the fiery chariot, and the longer I contemplated this favorite idea, the more practicable it appeared to me. I shall lay my thoughts before you, crude and undigested as they appeared to me, and by these hints you may be led into various trains of thinking upon this subject, and by that means (if any hints can assist your genius, which, without hints, is above all others I am acquainted with) be more likely to approve or disapprove. And as I am quite mad of the scheme, I hope you will not show this paper to anyone. These things are required: (1) a rotary motion; (2) easily altering its direction to any other direction; (3) to be accelerated, retarded, destroyed, revived, instantly and easily; (4) the bulk, the weight, the expense of the machine to be as small as possible in proportion to its weight.” Darwin gave sketches and suggested that the steam carriage should have three or four wheels, and be driven by an engine having two cylinders open at the top, and the steam condensed in the bottom of the cylinder, on Newcomen’s principle. The steam was to be admitted into the cylinders by cocks worked by the person in charge of the steering wheel, the injection cock being actuated by the engine. The “fiery chariot” never went beyond this suggestion, however.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth
An English gentleman of fortune, and much interested in mechanics, Richard Lovell Edgeworth was influenced by Dr. Erasmus Darwin to take up the subject of steam locomotion. In 1768, Dr. Small, in correspondence with James Watt, spoke of Edgeworth and his experiments in the problem of moving land and water carriages by steam. Two years later Edgeworth patented a portable railway system and then spent nearly forty years on that one idea.
When an old man of seventy, Edgeworth wrote to James Watt: “I have always thought that steam would become the universal lord, and that in time we should scorn the post horses.” Dr. Smiles says: “Four years later he died, and left the problem which he had nearly all his life been trying ineffectually to solve, to be worked out by younger men.”
Francis Moore
In 1769, Francis Moore, of London, a linen draper, invented a machine which he described as made of wood, iron, brass, copper, or other metals, and constructed upon peculiar principles, and capable of being wrought or put in motion by fire, water, or air, without being drawn by horses or any other beast or cattle; and which machines, or engines, upon repeated trials, he has discovered would be very useful in agriculture, carriage of persons and goods, either in coaches, chariots, chaises, carts, wagons, or other conveyances, and likewise in navigation, by causing ships, boats, barges, and other vessels to move, sail, or proceed, with more swiftness or despatch.
It was said that, so confident was the inventor of the success of his machine, he sold all his own horses, and by his advice many of his friends did the same, expecting that the price of that animal would be so affected by the invention, that it would not be again one-fourth of what it was then. Moore made several trials with his steam carriage, and took out three patents for it. Like many others of that time, however, Moore’s carriages never got into use.
Planta
A Swiss army officer who was contemporary with Cugnot in the seventeenth century. He was engaged upon the problem of a steam road wagon at about the same time that Cugnot conceived and executed his vehicle in 1769. General Gribeauval, to whom Cugnot’s plan had been referred, engaged Planta to pass upon it and to examine the new vehicle. The Swiss officer found it in all respects so much better than his own that he so reported to the French Ministry of War and abandoned further endeavors on that line.
J. S. Kestler
In 1680 a description was published of a carriage designed by J. S. Kestler. This was merely a toy, set in motion by mercury in a tube heated by a candle.
Blanchard
In connection with his partner, Masurier, Blanchard brought out in Paris, in 1779, a vehicle that was somewhat patterned after the man-propelled carriage of Elié Richard. It was very successful and attracted a great deal of attention.
Thomas Charles Auguste Dallery
Born at Amiens, France, September 4, 1754. Died at Jouy, near Versailles, in June, 1835.
About 1780, Dallery made a steam vehicle with a multi-tubular boiler which he claimed was an original invention of his own. This vehicle was run in Amiens and in 1790 was seen on the streets of Paris. In March, 1803, he secured a patent on the tubular boiler for use on his steamboat, or on his steam carriage. This vehicle was a boat-shaped wagon, driven by a steam engine.
James Watt
Born at Greenock, Scotland, January 19, 1736. Died at Birmingham, Staffordshire, England, August 25, 1819.
Watt came of a respectable and industrious family. His grandfather was a professor of mathematics, while his father was an instrument maker, councillor and manufacturer. After a limited education young Watt went to London, in 1755, and became a mathematical and nautical instrument maker. In that capacity he became connected with Glasgow University, and there made his discoveries that resulted in the practical improvements in the steam engine which made him famous. He was associated with Matthew Boulton, under the firm name of Boulton & Watt, from 1774 to 1800, and the Watt engines that were built by that concern at Soho revolutionized England’s mining industries. His steam engines represented a great step beyond the Newcomen engines, though still using low-pressure steam.
Watt’s connection with steam carriages for use on the common roads, a subject that was of much moment in his day, was limited to a single patent and generally to discouraging the plans of others in that direction, owing to his fear that the introduction of high-pressure steam use would harm the engine business. In the patent granted to him in 1784 he proposed that the boiler of his carriage should be made of wooden staves, fastened with iron hoops, like a cask, and the furnace to be of iron, and placed in the inside of the boiler, surrounded with water.
Watt, however, never built the steam carriage. He retained the deepest prejudices against the use of high-pressure steam, saying: “I soon relinquished the idea of constructing an engine on this principle; from being sensible it would be liable to some of the objections against Savery’s engine, viz., the danger of bursting the boiler, and also that a great part of the power of the steam would be lost, because no vacuum was formed to assist the descent of the piston.”
Robert Fourness
Born in Otley, Yorkshire, England. Died at an early age.
Fourness became a practical engineer and invented several labor-saving machines. One of his first inventions was for a machine to split hides, that was set up and operated in the establishment of his father. Later in life he established works for himself in Sheffield, and afterwards in Gainsborough. In 1788, he was a resident of Elland, Halifax, and there made a steam carriage that was run by a three-cylinder inverted engine. Spur-gearing transmitted the driving power from the crank shaft to the axle. His patent was taken out in conjunction with James Ashworth. This vehicle was mounted on two driving wheels and had a smaller steering wheel in front.
George Medhurst
Born at Shoreham, Kent, England, in February, 1759. Died in September, 1827.
Medhurst was educated as a clock maker, but in 1789 started as an engineer. In the same year he secured a patent for a windmill and pumps for compressing air to obtain motive power. One of the first investigators in this direction, the idea on which he worked and which continued to absorb his energy throughout life, was to make use of the wind when it served in order to compress large bodies of air for use when needed. In 1800, he took out a patent on an aeolian engine and demonstrated how carriages could be driven upon the common roads by compressed air stored in reservoirs underneath the body of the vehicle. He also contemplated applying this engine to other useful purposes and calculated that small carriages could be worked by a rotary engine and larger ones by reciprocating engines with special gear for varying power.
In describing his inventions and explaining his ideas regarding compressed air, Medhurst said: “The power applied to the machinery is compressed air, and the power to compress the air I obtain generally by wind, assisted and improved by machinery described in this specification, and in order to render my invention universally useful I propose to adapt my machinery and magazine so that it may be charged by hand, by a fall of water, by a vacuum obtained by wind and also by explosive and effervescent substances, for the rapid conveyance of passengers, mails, dispatches, artillery, military stores, etc., and to establish regular stage coaches and wagons throughout the kingdom, to convey goods and passengers, for public accommodation, by erecting windmills, water-mills, etc., at proper intervals upon the roads, to be employed in charging large magazines at these stations with compressed air, or in raising large magazines of water by wind, etc., by the power of which portable magazines may be charged when required by machinery for that purpose.”
Medhurst contemplated establishing regular lines of coaches, with pumping stations at regular stopping places. He endeavored to form a company to work his inventions and develop his plans and published a pamphlet on the subject of compressed air. About 1800, he established himself as a machinist and ironmaster in Denmark street, Soho, and about ten years later was the first to suggest pneumatic tubes for the carriage of parcels or passengers. Some two years later he brought out the proposition for what has come to be known as the atmospheric railway, an appliance for conveying goods and passengers by the power of a piston in a continuous tube laid between the rails.
Andrew Vivian
A resident of Cornwall, England, Andrew Vivian, a cousin of Richard Trevithick, became much interested in the engineering experiments of his famous relative. He worked with his cousin and particularly assisted him in experiments on steam engines for propelling road carriages. In 1802, he was a joint patentee with Trevithick, in the early steam vehicle that was taken to London and was exhibited in that city, where for a short time it occasioned a great deal of public curiosity.
Du Quet
A Frenchman who, in 1714, designed a small windmill to give motion to the wheels of his carriages.
J. H. Genevois
A Swiss clergyman, of the early part of the eighteenth century. He proposed to use windmills or sails on his wagon and by a system of springs to store the energy thus obtained until such time as it should be needed for driving purposes.
John Dumbell
In 1808, John Dumbell secured a patent for an engine that had many peculiar features. He planned to have the steam act on a series of vanes, or fliers, within a cylinder, “like the sails of a windmill,” causing them to rotate together with the shaft to which they were fixed. Gearing transmitted the motion of this shaft to the driving wheels. The inventor proposed to raise steam by permitting water to drop upon a metal plate, kept at an intense heat by means of a strong fire, which was stimulated by a pair of bellows.
William Brunton
Born at Dalkeith, Scotland, May 26, 1777. Died at Camborne, Cornwall, England, October 5, 1857.
The eldest son of Robert Brunton, a watch and clock maker, William Brunton studied mechanics first in his father’s shop and then in England, under the guidance of his grandfather, who was a colliery viewer. When he was thirteen years of age, in 1790, he began work in the fitting shops of the New Lanark cotton mills of David Dale and Richard Arkwright. Remaining in that establishment for six years he then went to the Boulton & Watt shops, at Soho, where he was gradually promoted, until he finally became the foreman and superintendent of engine manufacturing.
In 1813, he went to the Jessop’s Butterley Works, but remained there only three years, when he became a partner and mechanical manager of the Eagle Foundry, at Birmingham, a connection that he maintained for ten years. From 1825 to 1835, he was engaged in the practice of civil engineering in London. In the last-mentioned year, he became a share owner in the Cwm Avom tin works in Glamorganshire, Wales, where he superintended the erection of copper-smelting furnaces and rolling mills. He was also connected with the Maesteg Works in the same county and a brewery at Neath. Through the failure of these enterprises he lost the savings of his lifetime and was never again engaged actively in business. He invented many ingenious modes of reducing and manufacturing metals; made some of the original engines used on the Humber and the Trent and also some of the earliest that were seen on the Mersey, including those four vessels first operated on the Liverpool ferries in 1814. He also invented the calciner that was put in use in the tin mines at Cornwall and the silver ore works in Mexico.
Like nearly all the other engineers of his day, Brunton planned a steam carriage. This was built when he was at the Butterley Works, in 1813, and was called “the mechanical traveller.” Although a peculiar machine it worked with some degree of success, at a gradient of one in thirty-six, all the winter of 1814, at the Newbottle Colliery. The machine was a steam horse rather than a steam carriage. It consisted of a curious combination of levers, the action of which nearly resembled that of the legs of a man in walking, with feet alternately made to press against the ground of the road or railway, and in such a manner as to adapt themselves to the various inclinations or inequalities of the surface. The feet were of various forms, the great object being to prevent them from injuring the road, and to obtain a firm footing, so that no jerks should take place at the return of the stroke, when the action of the engine came upon them; for this purpose they were made broad, with short spikes to lay hold of the ground. The boiler was a cylinder of wrought iron, five feet six inches long, three feet in diameter, and of such strength as to be capable of sustaining a pressure of upwards of four hundred pounds per square inch. The working cylinder was six inches in diameter, and the piston had a stroke of twenty-four inches; the step of the feet was twenty-six inches, and the whole machine, including water, weighed about forty-five hundredweight. In 1815, the engine of this carriage exploded and killed thirteen persons.
Thomas Tindall
A steam engine was patented, in 1814, by Thomas Tindall, of Scarborough. The inventor proposed to use this for an infinitude of purposes, such as driving carriages for the conveyance of passengers, ploughing land, mowing grass and corn, or working thrashing machines. The carriage had three wheels—one for steering. The steam engine drove, by spur gearing, four legs, which, pushing against the ground, moved the carriage. The engine could also be made to act upon the two hind wheels for ascending hills, or for drawing heavy loads. A windmill, driven partly by the action of the wind, and partly by the exhaust steam from the engine, was used as adjunct power.