Automobile Biographies

This demonstration was in the presence of thousands of spectators, which he supposed would have convinced them of the practicability of steamboats and steam carriages. But no allowance was made by the public for the disproportion of the engine to its load, nor for the rough manner in which the machinery was fixed, or the great friction and ill form of the boat, and it was supposed that this was the utmost it could perform. Some individuals undertook to ridicule the experiment of driving so great a weight on land, because the motion was too slow to be useful. The inventor silenced them by answering that he would make a carriage propelled by steam, for a wager of three thousand dollars, to run upon a level road, against the swiftest horse that could be produced. This machine Evans named the Oructor Amphibolis.

On the 25th of September, 1804, Evans submitted to the consideration of the Lancaster Turnpike Company a statement of the costs and profits of a steam carriage to carry one hundred barrels of flour, fifty miles in twenty-four hours; tending to show that one such steam carriage would make more net profits than ten wagons, drawn by five horses each, on a good turnpike road, and offering to build one at a very low price. His address closed as follows: “It is too much for an individual to put in operation every improvement which he may invent. I have no doubt but that my engines will propel boats against the current of the Mississippi, and wagons on turnpike roads, with great profit. I now call upon those whose interest it is to carry this invention into effect. All of which is respectfully submitted to your consideration.” Little or no attention was paid to this offer, for it was difficult at that day to interest anyone in steam locomotion.

Evans’ interest in the steam carriage forthwith ceased, but in his writings, published about that time, he remarked: “The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds fly, fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Passing through the air with such velocity, changing the scene in such rapid succession, will be the most rapid exhilarating exercise. A carriage (steam) will set out from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup at New York in the same day.” To accomplish this he suggested railways of wood or iron, or smooth paths of broken stone or gravel, and predicted that engines would soon drive boats ten or twelve miles an hour. In the latter years of his life, Evans established a large iron foundry in Philadelphia.

Although Evans’ distinct contribution to the problem of steam locomotion on the common roads was not particularly practical it was at least important as being the first suggestion of anything of the kind in the United States. Road conditions in this country at that time were worse than they were in England and yet under more discouraging circumstances he was as far advanced in ideas and plans as his great contemporaries, Trevithick and others across the water. To Evans must be given the credit of perfecting the high-pressure, non-condensing engine, and even Trevithick, “the father of the locomotive,” was largely indebted to him for his progress in the lines he was working on in England, his plans and specifications having been sent abroad for the English engineers to inspect in 1784.

William Symington

Born at Leadhills, Scotland, October, 1783. Died in London, March 22, 1831.

More fortunate than most of the English inventors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with whom he was associated, William Symington came of a family that was able to give him a good education. His father was a mechanic who had charge of the engines and machinery at the Warlockhead lead mines, and the son gained his first knowledge of mechanics and engineering in the shops with his father. Intended for the ministry, he was sent to the University of Glasgow and the University of Dublin to pursue his studies. But the ministry had slight attractions for him, and when the time came for him to choose a profession, he adopted that of civil engineering.

In 1786 he worked out a model for a steam road-car. This was regarded very highly by all who saw it. It is said that Mr. Meason, manager of the lead mines at Warlockhead, was so pleased with the model, the merit of which principally belonged to young Symington, that he sent him into Edinburgh for the purpose of exhibiting it before the professors of the University, and other scientific gentlemen of the city, in the hope that it might lead in some way to his future advancement in life. Mr. Meason became the patron and friend of Symington, allowed the model to be exhibited at his own house, and invited many persons of distinction to inspect it. The carriage supported on four wheels had a locomotive behind, the front wheels being arranged with steering-gear. A cylindrical boiler was used for generating steam, which communicated by a steam-pipe with the two horizontal cylinders, one on each side of the firebox of the boiler. When steam was turned into the cylinder, the piston made an outward stroke; a vacuum was then formed, the steam being condensed in a cold water tank placed beneath the cylinders, and the piston was forced back by the pressure of the atmosphere. The piston rods communicated their motion to the driving-axle and wheels through rack rods, which worked toothed wheels placed on the hind axle on both sides of the engine, and the alternate action of the rack rods upon the tooth and ratchet wheels, with which the drums were provided, produced the rotary motion. The boiler was fitted with a lever and weight safety valve. Symington’s locomotive was abandoned, the inventor considering that the scheme of steam travel on the common roads was impracticable.

Henceforth, Symington gave his attention to the study of boat propulsion by steam. In 1787 he got out a patent for an improved form of steam engine, in which he obtained rotary action by chains and ratchet-wheels. This engine, with a four-inch cylinder, was used to work the paddles of a pleasure boat on Dalswinton Loch, in 1788, the boat steaming at the rate of five miles an hour. This boat is now in the South Kensington Museum, and it has been termed “the parent engine of steam navigation.” The experiment with this method of boat propulsion was so successful that a year later larger engines, with eighteen-inch cylinders, were fitted to another boat, which attained a speed of seven miles an hour. In 1801, Symington took out a patent for an engine with a piston rod guided by rollers in a straight path and connected by a rod with a crank attached directly to the paddle-wheel shaft—the system that has been in use ever since. Although the perfect practicability of this method of boat propulsion was fully demonstrated by a trial on the tugboat Charlotte Dundas, in March, 1802, the plan for steam power on canals and lakes was not carried further. The Forth and Clyde Company, and the Duke of Bridgewater, who were backing Symington, gave up the project and he could get help from no other sources. His inventions and experiments are generally regarded as marking the beginning of steam navigation. It is interesting to note that among those who were guests on the Charlotte Dundas, on the occasion of this trial trip, was Robert Fulton, who wrote a treatise on steam navigation in 1793, tried a small steamboat on the river Seine, in France, in 1803, and in 1807 launched his famous steamship, the Clermont, on the Hudson River.

Symington, disappointed and discouraged, gave up his work and went to London. The rest of his life was for the most part thrown away, and he became one of the waifs and strays of London. In 1825 he received a grant of one hundred pounds from the privy purse, and later on fifty pounds more, in recognition of his services for steam navigation. He died in obscurity and although he was unquestionably the pioneer in his country of the successful application of steam to navigation on inland waters his name is only a bare memory.

Nathan Read

Born in Warren, Mass., July 2, 1759. Died near Belfast, Me., January 20, 1849.

Graduated from Harvard College in 1781, Read was a tutor at Harvard for four years. In 1788 he began experimenting to discover some way of utilizing the steam engine for propelling boats and carriages. His efforts were mainly directed toward devising lighter, more compact machinery than then generally in use. His greatest invention at that time was a substitute for the large working-beam. This was a cross-head beam which ran in guides and had a connecting-rod with which motion was communicated. The new cylinder that he invented to attach to this working-frame was double-acting. In order to make the boiler more portable he invented a multi-tubular form, and this he patented, together with the cylinder, chain-wheel, and other appliances.

The boiler was cylindrical and was placed upright or horizontal, and the furnace was carried within it. A double cylinder formed a water-jacket, connected with a water and steam chamber above, and a water-chamber below. Numerous small straight tubes connected these two chambers. Read also invented another boiler in which the fire went through small spiral tubes, very much as it does in the present-day locomotives, and this was a smoke-consuming engine. For the purpose of acquiring motion he first used paddle-wheels, but afterward adopted a chain-wheel of his own invention.

Read planned a steam-car to be run with his tubular boiler, and it is said that this vehicle, when laden with fifty tons weight, could make five miles per hour. The model which was completed in 1790 had four wheels, the front pair being pivoted at the center and controlled by a horizontal sheave and rope. The sheave was located back near the boiler, and in guiding the machine it was operated by a hand-wheel placed above the platform, within easy reach of the engineer. A square boiler with Read’s multi-tubular system, overhung at the rear of the carriage. Two driving-wheels were forward of the boiler, and in front of these were two horizontal cylinders on each side of the engine. On the inside of each wheel were ratched teeth that fitted into corresponding teeth on horizontal racks above and below the hub. The piston, moving back and forth from the cylinder, engaged these teeth and caused a revolution of the wheel. There were two steam valves and two exhaust valves to each cylinder, the exhaust being into the atmosphere. Although this was the first conception of propulsion by steam on land in America, Read went no further in creating this model, inasmuch as he received no encouragement from financial sources.

In 1796, Read established at Salem, Mass., the Salem Iron Foundry, where he manufactured anchors, chain cables, and other machinery. In January, 1798, he invented a machine to cut and head nails at one operation. He also invented a method of equalizing the action of windmills by accumulating the force of the wind through winding up a weight; and a plan for harnessing the force of the tides by means of reservoirs which, by being alternately filled up and emptied, created a constant stream of water. Among his other inventions were a pumping engine and a threshing machine.

Richard Trevithick

Born in Illogan, in the west of Cornwall, England, April 13, 1771. Died in Dartford, Kent, April 22, 1833.

Richard Trevithick had meager educational advantages. His father was manager of the Dolcoath and other mines, and shortly after the birth of his son moved to Penponds, near Camborne, where the boy was sent to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, which were the limits of his attainments. Early in life he showed the dawning of remarkable inventive genius, was quick at figures and clever in drawing. He developed into a young man of notable physique, being six feet two inches high, and having the frame and the strength of an athlete. He was one of the most powerful wrestlers in the west country, and it is related of him that he could easily lift a thousand-weight mandril.

At the age of eighteen young Trevithick began to assist his father as mine manager, and at once proceeded to put his inventive faculty to practical test. His initial success, in 1795, was an improvement upon an engine at the Wheal Treasury mine, which accomplished a great saving in fuel and in power, and won for him his first royalty. Before his father died, in 1797, he had attained to the position of engineer at the Ding Dong mine, near Penzance, and had already set up at the Herland mine the engine built by William Bull, with improvements of his own. His earliest invention of importance was in 1797, when he made an improved plunger pump, which, in the following year, he developed into a double-acting water-pressure engine. One of these engines, set up in 1804, at the Alport mine, in Derbyshire, was run until 1850.

In 1780 he built a double-acting high-pressure engine with a crank, for Cook’s Kitchen mine. This was known as the Puffer, from the noise that it made, and it soon came into general use in Cornwall and South Wales, a successful rival of the low-pressure steam vacuum engine of Watt.

As early as 1796 Trevithick began to give attention to the subject of steam locomotion, and a model constructed by him before 1800 is now in the South Kensington Museum. He busied himself in designing and building a steam vehicle to travel upon the common highways. The work was done in a workshop at Camborne, and some of it in the shop of Captain Andrew Vivian. It was Christmas Eve of 1801 when this steam locomotive was completed and was brought out for trial.

The following account of the first trial was made by one who was present: “I knew Captain Dick Trevithick very well. I was a cooper by trade, and when Trevithick was making his steam carriage I used to go every day into John Tyack’s shop at the Weith, close by here, where they put her together. In the year 1801, upon Christmas Eve, towards night, Trevithick got up steam, out on the high road, just outside the shop. When we saw that Trevithick was going to turn on steam, we jumped up, as many as could, maybe seven or eight of us. ’Twas a stiffish hill going up to Camborne Beacon, but she went off like a little bird. When she had gone about a quarter of a mile there was a rough piece of road covered with loose stones. She didn’t go quite so fast, and as it was a flood of rain, and we were very much squeezed together, I jumped off. She was going faster than I could walk, and went up the hill about half a mile further, when they turned her and came back again to the shop.” The next day the engine steamed to Captain Vivian’s house, and a few days subsequently, Trevithick and Vivian started off for Tehidy House, where Lord Dedunstanville lived, some two or three miles from Camborne. On this journey they met with an accident, the engine being overturned in going around a curve; but they got back safely.

This carriage presented the appearance of an ordinary stage coach on four wheels. The engine had one horizontal cylinder which, together with the boiler and the furnace-box, was placed in the rear of the hind axle. The-motion of the piston was transmitted to a separate crank-axle, from which, through the medium of spur-gear, the axle of the driving-wheel, which was mounted with a fly-wheel, derived its motion. The steam cocks and the force-pump, as also the bellows used for the purpose of quickening combustion in the furnace, were worked off the same crank axle. This was one of the first successful high-pressure engines constructed on the principle of moving a piston by the elasticity of steam against the pressure only of the outside atmosphere.

In the following year Trevithick went to London with his cousin, Andrew Vivian, and secured a patent. Early in 1803 he made his second steam carriage. This was built at Camborne and taken to London, via Plymouth, for exhibition. Its journey along the highways thoroughly alarmed the country people. Coleridge relates that a toll-gate keeper was so frightened at the appearance of the sputtering, smoke-spitting thing of fearsome mien that, trembling in every limb and with teeth chattering, he threw aside the toll-gate with the scared exclamation, “No—noth—nothing to pay. My de—dear Mr. Devil, do drive on as fast as you can. Nothing to pay!”

The engine in this carriage had a cylinder five and one-half inches in diameter, with a stroke of two and one-half feet, and with thirty pounds of steam it worked five strokes per minute. In every way it was superior to its predecessor. It was not so heavy; and the horizontal cylinder, instead of the vertical, added very much to its steadiness of motion; while wheels of a larger diameter enabled it the more easily to pass over rough roads which had brought the Camborne one to a standstill. The boiler was made entirely of wrought iron, and the cylinder was inserted horizontally, close behind the driving axle. A forked piston-rod was used, the ends working in guides, so that the crank axle might be brought near to the cylinder. Spur gearing and couplings were used on each side of the carriage for communicating motion from the crank shaft to the main driving axle. The driving-wheels were about ten feet diameter, and made of wood. The framing was of wrought iron. The coach was intended to seat eight or ten persons, and the greater part of the weight came on the driving axle. The coach was suspended upon springs.

The London steam carriage was put together at Felton’s carriage shop, in Leather Lane, and after its completion, Vivian one day ran the locomotive from Leather Lane, Gray’s Inn Lane, on to Lords’ Cricket Ground, to Paddington, and home again by way of Islington, a journey of ten miles through the streets of London. Several trips were made in Tottenham Court Road and Euston Square, and only once did they meet with accident. Finally, however, the frame of the carriage got twisted, and the engine was detached and set to driving a mill.

Trevithick’s next experiment was made in 1803-4, while he was engineer of the Pen-y-darran iron works, near Merthyr Tydvil, where he built and ran on a railway a locomotive that was fairly successful. In 1808 he built a locomotive for a circular railway or steam circus that he and Andrew Vivian set up in London, near Euston Square. This ran for several weeks, carrying passengers at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles an hour around curves of fifty or one hundred feet radius. One day a rail broke and the engine was overturned, which ended the exhibition.

Subsequently, Trevithick applied his high-pressure engine to rock-boring and breaking, and dredging. He laid out a system of dredging the Thames River, planned a tunnel under the Thames, invented a high-pressure steam threshing engine in 1812, constructed iron tanks and buoys, and modeled an iron ship. He was one of the first to conceive the practical use of steam in agriculture, declaring that the use of the steam engine for this purpose would “double the population of the kingdom and make our markets the cheapest in the world.”

In 1814, Trevithick became interested in a plan to work the silver mines of Peru by Cornish methods, and nine of his high-pressure engines were sent to South America in charge of Henry Vivian and other engineers. He himself followed in 1816, and remained in that country ten years, making and losing several fortunes during that time. Finally, in a revolution, the mining plants were destroyed, and he was forced to leave the country, penniless. For a time he was prospecting in Costa Rica, where he planned a railroad across the Isthmus from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1827 he returned to England, still a poor man, and settling in Dartford, Kent, devoted himself to new inventions, unsuccessfully endeavoring to secure the help of the government in his work. His later years were spent in poverty, and when he died, the expense of his burial was borne by his fellow-workmen of Dartford.

Undoubtedly, Trevithick was one of the foremost English engineers of his day, a period that was rich with strong men of distinction in his profession. By many he has been considered as having contributed more even than James Watt to the development of the steam engine and its broader adaptation to practical uses. In his early years he was restrained in putting his ideas and experiments to practical test by the restrictions of Watt’s patents. Finally when that difficulty was removed he at once took a leading position in his profession. Especially in the development of the high pressure engine he is entitled to at least as much credit as any man of his day. His genius was fully recognized in his generation and his impoverished old age was the result of financial reverses in business operations and not from the lack of substantial rewards for his inventive achievements.

David Gordon

The first experiments of David Gordon, who in 1819 was working with William Murdock, in Soho, were for the purpose of using compressed air for common road locomotives. He also invented a portable gas apparatus, and originated a society of gentlemen, with the intention of forming a company for the purpose of running a mail coach and other carriages by means of a high-pressure engine, or of a gas vacuum or pneumatic engine, supplied with portable gas. Alexander Gordon, his son, states that “the committee of the society had only a limited sum at their disposal, nor were there to be more funds until a carriage had been propelled for a considerable distance at the rate of ten miles an hour.” David Gordon then tried to prevail upon the committee to make use of a steam engine, but evidently without success.

In 1821 he took out a patent for improvements in wheel carriages, and his locomotive is fully described in the interesting Treatise on Elemental Locomotion, by Mr. Alexander Gordon. The machine consisted of a large hollow cylinder about nine feet in diameter and five long, having its internal circumference provided with a continuous series of cogged teeth, into which were made to work the cogged running wheels of a locomotive steam engine, similar to that of Trevithick. The steam power being communicated to the wheels of the carriage, caused them to revolve, and to climb up the internal rack of the large cylinder. The center of gravity of the engine being thus constantly made to change its position, and to throw its chief weight on the forward side of the axis of the cylinder, the latter was compelled to roll forward, propelling the vehicle before it, and whatever train might be added.

Gordon’s next attempt to construct locomotive carriages for the common road was in 1824. The means proposed was a modification of the method invented by William Brunton. But instead of the propellers being operated upon by the alternating motion of the piston-rod, as in Brunton’s vehicle, Gordon contrived to give them a continuous rotatory action and to apply the force of the engines in a more direct manner. The carriage ran upon three wheels, one in the front to steer by, and two behind to bear the chief weight. Each of the wheels had a separate axle, the ends of which had their bearings upon parallel bars, the wheels rolling in a perpendicular position. This arrangement, by avoiding the usual cross-axle, afforded an increased uninterrupted space in the body of the vehicle.

In the fore part of the carriage were placed the steam engines, consisting of two brass cylinders, in a horizontal position, but vibrating upon trunnions. The piston-rods of these engines gave motion to an eight-throw crank, two in the middle for the cylinders, and three on each side, to which were attached the propellers; by the revolution of the crank, these propellers or legs were successively forced outwards, with the feet of each against the ground in a backward direction, and were immediately afterwards lifted from the ground by the revolution of another crank, parallel to the former, and situated at a proper distance from it on the same frame. The propelling-rods were formed of iron gas-tubes, filled with wood, to combine lightness with strength. To the lower ends of these propelling-rods were attached the feet, in the form of segments of circles, and made on their under side like a short and very stiff brush of whalebone, supported by intermixed iron teeth, to take effect in case the whalebone failed. These feet pressed against the ground in regular succession, by a kind of rolling, circular motion, without digging it up. The guide had the power of lifting these legs off the ground at pleasure, so that in going down hill, when the gravity was sufficient for propulsion, nothing but a brake was put into requisition to retard the motion, if necessary. If the carriage was proceeding upon a level, the lifting of the propellers was equivalent to the subtraction of the power, and soon brought it to a full stop. When making turns in a road the guide had only to lift the propellers on one side of the carriage and allow the others to operate alone, until the curve was traversed.