4 o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE EVOLUTION AND PBESENT STATUS OF THE 

 AUTOMOBILE. 



By WILLIAM BAXTER, Jr. 



IN this closing year of a century which is marked by unparalleled 

 advances in science and its applications to the industrial arts, we 

 are very much inclined to take it for granted that none of the inven- 

 tions that are regarded by us as indicative of the highest order of 

 progressive tendency, could by any possibility have been thought of 

 by our forefathers; and as the automobile is looked upon as an ultra- 

 progressive idea, no one who has not investigated the subject would 

 believe for a moment that its conception could antedate the present 

 generation, much less the present century. The records, however. 



Fig. 1. Cugnot's Steam Gun Carriage, Made in 1763. 



show that the subject engrossed the attention of inventive minds many 

 hundreds of years ago. In fact, as far back as the beginning of the 

 thirteenth century a Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon prophesied 

 that the day would come when boats and carriages would be propelled 

 by machinery. 



The first authentic record of a self-propelled carriage dates back 

 to the middle of the sixteenth century. The inventor was Johann 

 Haustach, of Nuremburg. The device is described as a chariot pro- 

 pelled by the force of springs, and it is said that it attained a speed 

 of two thousand paces per hour, about one mile and a quarter. Springs 

 have been tried by many inventors since that time, but always without 

 success from the simple fact that the amount of energy that can be 

 stored in a spring is practically insignificant. 



In 1763 a Frenchman by the name of Cugnot devised a vehicle that 

 was propelled by steam, and a few years after the date of his first 

 experiment, constructed for the French Government a gun carriage 

 which is shown in Fiff. 1. As will be seen, the design was of the 



