50 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



VII 



' Carriages without horses shall go," is the 

 " prophecy ' attributed to that mythical fifteenth 

 century pythoness, Mother Shipton ; really the ex 

 'post facto forgery of Charles Hindley, the second-hand 

 bookseller, in 1862. It should not be difficult, on such 

 terms, to earn the reputation of a seer. 



Between 1823 and 1838, ths era of the steam- 

 carriages, that prognostication had already been 

 fulfilled : and again, in another sense, with the intro- 

 duction of railways. But it was not until the close of 

 1896 that the real horseless era began to dawn. 

 Railways, extravagantly discriminative tolls, and 

 restrictions upon weight and speed killed the steam- 

 carriages, and for more than fifty years the highways 

 knew no other mechanical locomotion than that of 

 the familiar traction-engines, restricted to three miles 

 an hour and preceded by a man with a red flag. It 

 is true that a few hardy inventors continued to waste 

 their time and money on devising new forms of steam- 

 carriages, and were only fined for their pains when 

 they were rash enough to venture On the public roads, 

 as when Bateman, of Greenwich, invented a steam- 

 tricycle, and Sir Thomas Parky n, Bart., was fined 

 at Greenwich Police Court, April 8th, 1881, for 

 riding it. 



That incident appears to have finally quenched 

 the ardour of inventive genius in this country ; but 

 a new locomotive force already existing unsuspected 

 was about this period being experimented with on 

 the Continent by one Gottlieb Daimler, whose name — 

 generally mispronounced — is now sufficiently familiar 

 to all who know anything of motor-cars. 



Daimler was at that time connected with the Otto 

 Gas Engine Works in Germany, where the adaptive 

 Germans were exploiting the gas-engine principle 

 invented by Crossley many years before. 



In 1886 Daimler produced his motor-bicycle, and 

 by 1891 his motor engine was adapted by Panhard 



