336 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1934 



struggling to make itself heard above the loud praise of the buggy, 

 just as the latter had attempted to shout down the old one-hoss shay 

 70 years before. 



Looking backward over the thousands of years of development of 

 highway travel, one sees an intimate relationship between the high- 

 way and the vehicle. First the trail suggested vehicles, then the 

 vehicles suggested better trails. The improvement of trails into 

 roads permitted the betterment of vehicles, and so the story is re- 

 peated century after century with constant improvements of each 

 agency. In the United States between the seventeenth and twentieth 

 centuries the gradual improvement in highways permitted the grad- 

 ual improvement of vehicles from the heavy, massive, combrous, 

 slow, springless cart and wagon to the light spring wagon and dainty 

 speedy buggy. And of the host of vehicles devised in this time, none 

 so clearly illustrate this transition and none were so intimately asso- 

 ciated with our political, commercial, and cultural development as 

 the Conestoga wagon, the stage coach, the chaise, and the buggy. 



IV 



Toward the close of the eighteenth century when so many inter- 

 esting new applications of the mechanical sciences were being made 

 in Euro^De, there developed a belief in some quarters that man 

 could, by some mechanical contrivance, propel himself as readily 

 as he could be drawn by a horse and wagon. His first efforts in this 

 direction rather disproved the theory, for there resulted very cum- 

 brous and complicated vehicles, the propulsion of which was most 

 laborious. One of the first of these was a 4-wheeled chaiselike 

 vehicle called a " Quadricycle " mentioned by a professor in Trinity 

 College, Dublin, Ireland, and described in the English Gentlemen's 

 Magazine for August 17G9. The front wheels were steered by means 

 of a handle coming up through the floor and the two back wheels, 

 5 feet in diameter, were driven by means of a pair of ratchet wheels 

 on their axle. The published description continues thus : 



The method of putting this chaise in motion is this: A person being seated 

 in the body takes hold of the handle to direct it while another person gets 

 Into the box (over the rear axle) and treading alternately on the planks 

 behind, turns the pulley, which makes the plates of iron catch hold of the 

 notches in the little wheels and consequently sets them and the big wlieels in 

 motion, and forces the machine along, quicker or slower, according to the 

 rapidity of the motion of the person's feet who stands on the planks. 



A writer in the London Magazine of the same date in commenting 

 on the Quadricycle wrote : " The velocity of these carriages depends 

 upon the activity of the manager." Similar vehicles cropped up in 

 subsequent j^ears in France and Germany, but nothing came of any 

 of them, for they were never publicly regarded as anything but a 

 toy. 



