340 AN-NUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 4 



one of which used brute power for its propulsion. One was the 

 hobby horse and the other was the steam-engined coach. The people 

 of Europe had been prepared more or less for the "horseless car- 

 riage ", for there had already been made numerous applications of 

 the power of steam not onlj^ to operate machinery and to pump 

 water out of mines but also to propel boats. Nevertheless, man the 

 world over had been accustomed too long to animal-drawn vehicles 

 to accept the new contraption immediately, and his first impulse, 

 in which he succeeded temporarily, was to ridicule it out of 

 existence. 



As early as 1769, the year in which James Watt patented his im- 

 proved steam engine, Nicholas Cugnot, a French captain of artillery, 

 constructed a three-wheeled steam tractor for pulling heavy cannon. 

 It traveled at the rate of 214 miles an hour, but the steam generated 

 in the boiler lasted only 12 to 15 minutes. Fifteen years later, 

 William Murdock, one of Watt's workmen, made several successful 

 experimental steam carriages of model size, but under pressure from 

 his employer he soon abandoned the invention. Then came three 

 bold individuals, Richard Trevithick in England and Oliver Evans 

 and Nathan Read in the United States, the first two champions of 

 high-pressure steam engines and all of them advocates of the use of 

 such engines, because of their lightness and compactness, to propel 

 road coaches and wagons. Trevithick actually built a steam road 

 coach in 1803 and tried it in the streets of London, and Evans in 

 1804 transported through the streets of Philadelphia under its own 

 power a steam dredge that he had built for the city. Read peti- 

 tioned the Congress in 1790 for a patent on the application of his 

 double-acting steam engine to road carriages, but that body so ridi- 

 culed the idea that he eliminated it in his second petition of 1791. 

 The three men were, of course, considerably ahead of their times, and 

 their respective efforts came to naught except that they paved the 

 way for others to try their hands at steam highway travel. 



After a lapse of some 20 years, W. H. James and Sir Goldsworthy 

 Gurney in England and Thomas Blanchard in America revived the 

 idea through the invention of their steam carriages in 1824 and 1825, 

 respectively. Blanchard failed to obtain either moral or financial 

 support, but Gurney did, and a coach was built in 1827 weighing 2 

 tons and, with 6 passengers inside and 12 outside, attained a speed of 

 15 miles an hour. Gurney's coaches were taken over by Sir Charles 

 Dance, who improved them and for 5 months in 1831 ran them reg- 

 ularly 4 times a day between Gloucester and Cheltenham, a distance 

 of 9 miles. Speed, including stops, averaged 11 miles an hour. The 

 public put an abrupt halt to this venture, however, by continually 



