farmers carry goods to market with little effort, heavy con- 

 struction material is swiftly delivered directly to the job, 

 vacations are readily enjoyed, and emergencies are quickly 

 met, all with a machine that two generations ago was in 

 its infancy. 



True, there were huge self-propelled road vehicles many 

 generations earlier, but they were clumsy steam monsters 

 which contributed little to the development of the light- 

 weight, flexible, and more practical gasoline-engined vehi- 

 cles that appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth 

 century both here and abroad. 



In addition, many unusual and less practical vehicles 

 powered by sails, clockwork, pedals, treadmills, and various 

 forms of human and animal power had been conceived, if 

 not actually constructed. The majority of these probably 

 were never built, but extant drawings of them remind us 

 of the ingenuity of their designers. -One of them was the 

 jet-propelled steam vehicle said to have been suggested by 

 Sir Isaac Newton toward the end of the seventeenth 

 century. 



Nicolas Joseph Cugnot 



Figure 1 . — Cugnot's steam-powered vehicle of 1 770, now preserved in the 

 Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers at Paris. 



