330 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1934 



tural improvements of the period, and by the close of the seventeenth 

 century there were in use not only elaborate chariots, coaches, and 

 pleasure carriages of royalty and people of high rank, but also the 

 privately owned coaches of wealthy citizens. Stage wagons as well as 

 covered carts appeared on the highways. The eighteenth century saw 

 the introduction of stage and mail coaches in Europe and the first 

 practical attempts to improve the riding qualities of vehicles for the 

 comfort of passengers. Carriages with the body cradled in leather 

 straps had appeared in 1650, and in 1670 someone in England tried 

 steel springs to ease road shocks. Neither idea, however, was gen- 

 erally adopted until well into the eighteenth century, and elliptical 

 springs did not appear on vehicles until the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century. This invention, made by Obadiah Elliott of Lambeth, 

 England, in 1804, eliminated the long pole or perch of wood and iron 

 connecting the front and rear axles of a vehicle and also the cross beds 

 that had been regularly used. As Thrupp ^ wrote : 



By the introduction of elliptic springs the construction of wheeled vehicles 

 has been rendered less costly, their weight has been materially reduced, and 

 many complicated parts have been abandoned. 



The invention really marks the beginning of the modern era of 

 coachbuilding which, through the efforts of thousands of skillful 

 coachmakers and wheelwrights throughout the world, brought the 

 vehicular art to its highest attainments by the close of the century. 



Ill 



Archeological studies in the Western Hemisphere and in America 

 indicate that man has occupied this portion of the world only since 

 the close of the Pleistocene, for it was at this time that he is believed 

 to have migrated from his native Asia. He was a savage nomad then 

 and continued as such for a good many thousands of years, for he 

 seems to have been somewhat backward. His relatives in Asia had 

 almost passed through the Stone Age before he began it ; in fact, age 

 for age, he was just about 5,000 years behind the Egyptians and about 

 3,000 years behind the peoples of Europe. The oldest agricultural 

 cultures in the United States in the Southwest are set at about 3000 

 B. C, and assuming that man's progress here ran a parallel course 

 to that of his eastern relatives, it must have been about this time that 

 he learned to domesticate animals. But in transportation, western 

 man was greatly handicapped. True, he had the dog and llama, but 

 he was without horses, the breed having become extinct thousands of 

 years before his time. His progress in transjDortation was accordingly 

 slow and continued so until the horse was brought to him by European 

 immigrants following Columbus' discovery of the New World. Once 



•Thrupp, G. A., The history of coaches, 1877. 



