Horseless vehicles

The rapid advance in the industry appertaining to mechanical appliances for locomotion on common roads seems to need a better representation than it has yet had in book form, especially in its relation to the automobile industry in the United States.

It is hoped that the numerous inquiries in relation to motors and vehicles that have been received by the author will find a fair and satisfactory reply in the pages of this work.

Then there need be no apology for the publication of a work to meet the wants of seekers for  information in this new line of industry which exemplifies a new phase in the ways and means of a people for gratifying their desires for new modes and economies in travel for pleasure or business.

In the development of new modes of power resources and in the improvement of well-known powers for automobile uses, is involved a vast business aspect and comparatively a new departure in business lines.

There has been as yet but little published in book form that has proved satisfactory to the general reader or inquirer on the subject of the mechanism and motive power for common road locomotion.

The technical press in the United States seems to have been the only source of information and illustration in regard to this newly developed industry, and to this the author is much indebted for details and illustrations.

It is proposed in this work to bring the practical working details of the horseless vehicle as clearly as possible to the understanding of the general reader.

Personal inspection and critical examination of the mechanism of the motive power and running gear is the best method of arriving at the facts as to the operation and durability of so important an element as their power factor.

To some extent this has been afforded and has contributed much to the detailed description that has been given and illustrated in this work. A free reference to patent illustration and description does not always give a true conception of a mechanism that becomes a manufacture after a patent has been issued; improvements and changes suggested by trials and experience take the place of the patented exhibit, when the patented feature in a measure is greatly changed and sometimes lost.

The theoretical consideration of power and its mathematical expressions are so fully treated in technical works on steam, explosion motors, electricity and compressed air, that a repetition of such topics in this work will not, it is thought, increase its interest for the general reader or for the user of the automobile.

With the recent advent in force, of motor vehicles under their various synonyms of horseless carnage, automobile, auto-cars, and motor-cycles, in a list in which the roots auto and moto enter into many names designating the specialties of manufacture in Europe and in the United States, comes the search by the curious to find the true history of progress in the development of self-propelled vehicles.

Wheels as a rolling device have been in use for more than four thousand years with oxen and horses as their propelling power for transportation. The only improvement during the past four hundred years has been in the art design of the vehicles, and only during the past two centuries has thought been given to other means or powers of vehicle propulsion.

The spirit of invention and improvement seems to have taken a movement among thinking minds in the fourteenth century and was thus early expounded by that philosopher in mechanics, Roger Bacon, in the following prophetic words:

"We will be able to construct machines which will propel ships with greater speed than a whole garrison of rowers, and which will need only one pilot to guide them , we will be able to propel carriages with incredible speed without the, assistance of any animal, and we will be able to make machines which, by means of wings, will enable us to fly in the air like birds."

The first indication of the application of a mechanical device for the propulsion of vehicles seems to have begun in the sixteenth century in a vehicle propelled by springs, built in Nuremberg, Holland, by Johann Haustach. The spring motor fever raged at times during the passing centuries and seems to have culminated in the United States a quarter of a century since as spring-stored power for street railway cars and vehicles. Its life for such work was short. Its true sphere is a lasting one through the centuries for the storage of power for time service.

Wind sails for vehicle propulsion was a common sight in Holland away back in the palmy days of the republic and have since been seen on our Western prairies, but no permanent success has resulted from this power for vehicle propulsion.

The first effort at propelling a vehicle by steam seems to have been made bv a Jesuit missionary, Father Verbrest, in the thirteenth century, probably using the re-action wheel of the Heron type that had apparently laid dormant for more than a thousand years.

It was a steam propelled vehicle, with a motor of the reciprocating type, that made its advent with the early progress of the steam engine for power purposes that was the forerunner of the thousands of self-propelled vehicles that have as it seems sprung into useful operation during the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Steam traction vehicles for haulage, for drays, for plowing and for passenger service have advanced steadily in Europe and in the United States, even extending to many other countries.

The advent of the internal combustion motor soon gave a new phase to the self-propelled vehicle, and gave a further impulse to its use as a pleasure carriage.

The electric motor and the storage battery seem to have followed in due time to form the triad of powers that will give the horseless vehicle all the probable elements of success in every avenue of usefulness.

The gasoline motor was first used for vehicle propulsion with success about 1888, but was proposed at an earlier date by Lenoir in France. The electric motor and storage battery soon followed and came into use within the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The patents in the United States for motive power and running gear date back to the beginning of the century in small numbers, increased in the decades from 1860 to 1880, and in the last decade of the century swelled up to a total of about 275. The earlier patents that expired previous to 1886 covered nearly all the essential features of the present construction.

It appears from published data that in Europe there are now well over 7,000 owners of automobiles. Many of these own more than one vehicle, so that perhaps the number of vehicles could be put at 10,000 Of the 7,000 no fewer than 5,600 are in France. The general idea has been that in France the interest was centered in Paris, but this is erroneous, there being of the 5,600 no fewer than 4,541 scattered all through the departments. In France, moreover, there are 619 manufacturers of automobiles, not including makers of detail parts, 998 of them, 1,095 repair shops, 3,939 stores for oil, gas, etc., and 265 electric charging plants and "posts." For the remainder of Europe the figures are far from complete, but it would appear that there are 268 owners of automobiles in Germany, 90 in Austro-Hungary, 90111 Belgium, 44 in Spain, 3 "4 in Great Britain, 1 1 1 in Italy, 68 in Holland, 114 in Switzerland, and 35 in Russia, Denmark, Portugal.

No such figures as these are at present obtainable for the United States, and if we put the number of automobiles in this country at 700 it will probably be an exaggeration. The number of makers actually at work or organizing is probably more than 100. Fortunately for our credit, as an inventive and enterprising nation, the first year of the new century ushers in with every promise of a great outburst of activity in the manufacture of automobiles of every description.

American constructors of gasoline motor vehicles have from the beginning aimed to regulate speed through the motor and to reduce the speed gears to one or two, obtaining all intermediate speeds by increase or diminution of the charge. In many of the French and American vehicles intermediate speeds are obtained by varying the tension of driving belt or other friction devices, and it is to be noted that the very latest French construction tends in the same direction as our own, viz., toward speed regulation by the motor. This tendency is universal, and it is only because the necessity of striking out in that direction was appreciated in the United Slates from the beginning that American constructors to-day may be considered as far, if not farther, advanced than their competitors in other countries where automobile experience is of much older date When the speed changes in gasoline vehicles are under consideration, it should also be remembered that the momentum of a vehicle in motion always serves to efface all abruptness in the transition from a higher speed to a lower one or the reverse.


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Horseless vehicles