Part 1 (1/2)

Autoraphies

by Lye sense the history of the rise of the automobile has been a history of soineers, manufacturers and active business men of more than a full century The subject of self-propelled vehicles on the common roads has enlisted the faculties of rossed with the study and the solution oflove of science; it has had the financial support of those whose energies are constantly and forcefully exerted in the industrial and coe; it has received the ard as of paramount importance any addition to the sum of successful human endeavor and any influence that contributes to the further advance of ht this book of AUTOMOBILE BIOGRAPHIES has been prepared On its pages are sketches of the lives and the work of those who have beentheit to the public needs for pleasure or business and in pro the field of its utility

Included herein are accounts of the pioneer inventors, the noted investigators and the contemporaneous workers who have helped to make the automobile in its many forms the most remarkable mechanical success of to-day and theaddition to the conveniences of modern social, industrial and commercial life These sketches have been carefully prepared from the best sources of information, works of reference, personal papers and so on, and are believed to be thoroughly accurate and reliable Much of the inforly rare old voluenerally accessible, and it comes with a full flavor of newness Much also has been acquired froiven to the public

The investigator into this subject will find, doubtless, to his very great surprise, that the story of the pioneer inventors, who, in the early part of the nineteenth century, experie, has been recorded voluminously and with much detail It was a notable movement, that absorbed the abundant attention of inventors, e at that tireat deal of particularity the experies, and the proers and the hauling of goods Modern students and historians of this subject find thereatly indebted to the writers of that epoch, like Gordon, Herbert and others, who preserved, with such painstaking care, for future generations, as well as for their own time, the account of the lives and labors of such men as Watt, Trevithick, Maceroni, Hancock and others

Every enerously fro the later period from the middle of the century that has just ended, down to the present time, there is less concrete information, readily available With the cessation of public interest in the round, by inventors, engineers and those who had previously been financial backers of the experiive the subject the enthusiastic attention that they had before bestowed upon it Records of that period are scant, partly because there was so little to record and partly because no one cared to record even that little

Until comparatively recent times the historian of the self-propelled vehicle, as so o, had not reappeared Even now his work is generally of a desultory character, voluely ephemeral It is widely scattered, not easily accessible and already considerably forgotten from day to day Especially of the men of the last half century, who have made the present-day autoreater future, the following pages present ether in this form It is both history and the material for history

It is believed that these sketches will be found peculiarly interesting and permanently valuable Individually they are clear presentations of the achieveineers and inventors of the last hundred years Collectively they present a coradual developons of Cugnot, Trevithick, Evans and others to the perfected carriage of to-day

The chapter on The Origin and Development of the Automobile is a careful study and review of the conditions that attended the attees, the tentative experi with bicycles, tricycles and other vehicles in the middle of the last century and the renaissance of the last two decades Several of the illustrations are froraphs

It is not possible to set down here all the authorities that have been consulted in the preparation of this work Special acknowledgazine for perborn for perarding the early steam inventors contained in his work, The World's Railway, and to reproduce portrait sketches of Trevithick, Murdoch, and Read, from the same valuable volume

LYMAN HORACE WEEKS

NEW YORK, January, 1905

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE AUTOMOBILE

STRANGE EARLY VEHICLES

He ould fully acquaint hirowth of the idea of travel by self-propelled vehicles on the public highways o further back in the annals of the past than he is likely first to anticipate Nearly three centuries agoattention to the subject, although their thoughts at that tiinative speculation Even before that philosophers occasionally dreaer Bacon, in the thirteenth century, looking into the distant future, made this prediction: ”It will be possible to construct chariots so that without animals they may be moved with incalculable speed” It was several hundred years before ive practical attention to this idea, and about 1740 good Bishop Berkeley could only make this as a prediction and not a realization: ”Mark ht to use in place of a feed of oats”

But the ancients, in a way, anticipated even Roger Bacon and Bishop Berkeley, for Heliodorus refers to a triumphal chariot at Athens that was moved by slaves orked the machinery, and Pancirollus also alludes to such chariots

HORSELESS WAGONS IN CHINA

Approaching the seventeenth century the investigator finds that definite exa more numerous, even if as yet not very practical

China, which, like Egypt, seems to have known and buried many ideas centuries before the rest of the world achieved them, had horseless vehicles before 1600 These h they were not propelled by an engine, for the present autorowth of that old idea to eliminate the horse as the means of travel

Matthieu Ricci, 1552-1610, a Jesuit on not drawn by horses or other animals was in common use In an early collection of travels this vehicle was described as follows: ”This river is so cloyed with shi+ps because it is not frozen in winter that the way is stopped with e his way by water into another (on, if we ht sit in the middle as 'twere on horseback, and on each side another, the waggoner putting 't swiftly and safely forwards with levers or barres of wood (those waggons driven by wind and gayle he mentions not)” It was somewhat later than this that China was indebted to that other fae, which, however, was not much more than a toy