September 19, 1901] 



NATURE 



519 



additional houses they cause additional congestion to the main 

 roads. They lay out their roads to obtain quiet for those who 

 live on the estate, and take every possible means to prevent 

 their estate roads from taking a share of the main thoroughfare 

 traffic. 



Parliament must take in hand an improved administration of 

 our highways by a comprehensive scheme. Far too many 

 ancient main lines of thoroughfare, already too narrow for the 

 traffic which is on them, are being blocked by having tramways 

 laid on them ; these cause the development of building estates, 

 which throw .idditional traffic on to these thoroughfares. Apart 

 from the roads themselves, the complicated conditions of street 

 and road traffic demand careful regulation. .Street traffic should 

 be carried so far as possible by lines of vehicles driven as nearly 

 parallel to one another as possible. The rule of the road, as it 

 is called, and which is embodied in an Act of Parliament, 5 and 

 6 of William IV., which is commonly called the Highways .\ct, 

 says that every vehicle is to keep as close as possible to the left, 

 or near side of the road, except when overtaking another vehick 

 going in the same direction, and then it is to keep to the offside 

 of the overtaken vehicle as closely as possible. As a matter of 

 fact, everybody knows that this rule is habitually neglected by 

 drivers who, whenever they get a chance, drive down the centre 

 of the road, so that others who overtake them dare not do 

 so on the wrong or near side, but must pass out far to the 

 off side of the road, and consequently interfere with the 

 traffic coming in the opposite direction. This neglect of 

 the rule of the road causes a great waste of space immedi- 

 ately behind every vehicle, and is one of the chief causes 

 of the limited carrying capacity of the streets in cities where the 

 police do not attend to this important matter. It can be remedied 

 by the existing police regulations being adhered to and insisted 

 on by fixed-point constables, or by constables moving about on 

 motor-cars or bicycles. Slow moving and frequently stopping 

 vehicles are another cause of congested traffic. A great deal 

 might be done by arranging that during certain hours much of 

 the slower moving traffic is shunted into alternative routes, so as 

 to be kept by itself. An increase in the speed of the street 

 traffic is desirable : for the faster the vehicles travel the less the 

 street is occupied by them. Motor-cars can safely travel at si.\- 

 teen miles an hour, and, therefore, need only take half the time 

 and occupy only half the street surface that an omnibus does when 

 travelling at eight miles per hour. .Such high speeds as these, 

 which are desirable and perfectly safe for motor cars, cannot, 

 however, be obtained unless some regulations are made as to the 

 use of the roadways by foot passengers. There is no rule of 

 the road for foot passengers — they pass one another on the foot- 

 path, or vehicles in the roadway, just as they please. No driver 

 of a vehicle in the road who sees a foot passenger stepping into 

 the roadway can ever tell with certainty what his movements 

 will be. It will be no hardship to foot passengers to insist on 

 their movements being regulated. 



Much has been recently said and written on the subject of 

 motor-cars and motor-wagons. It is generally admitted that 

 there will be considerable scope for engineering skill and capital 

 in their improvement and construction. It is by no means an 

 easy problem to put into the hands of the public such a compli- 

 cated piece of mechanism as a self-propelled carriage which has 

 in most cases to be managed and driven by men who have had no 

 special mechanical training. Motor-cars to be universally 

 successful must be made so as to reduce to a minimum the 

 liability to break down ; repairs must be limited to the replace- 

 ment of worn or damaged parts by other parts, which must be 

 supplied by the manufacturers so that they can be readily put in 

 by the unskilled users. That this can be done is shown by 

 the success and universal use of typewriters, sewing machines, and 

 bicycles : all of these are really complicated pieces of mechanism, 

 but which are now in such general use and in everyone's hands. 

 In these cases, however, the organised manufacture of machines 

 with thoroughly interchangeable parts, or components as it is 

 the fashion to call them, has only been developed after the type 

 of machine had settled down, and this up to the present cannot 

 be said of the motor-car or motor-wagon. Up to the present the 

 development of these cars has gone on on several lines. The 

 development in France, which so far has led the world, has 

 been principally in the direction of the use of light motors 

 driven by petrol spirit. Again to France we owe the flash 

 boiler of Serpollet, which assists the use of steam engines for this 

 purpose. 



At first sight steam, with the complications of boiler, engine, 



and condenser, does not appear likely to compete favourably 

 with the simpler spirit motor, but for heavier vehicles, where 

 steady heavy pulling power is of importance, up to the present 

 no internal combustion motor has competed with it. The 

 Americans, with their usual skill and power of rapidly organising 

 a new manufacture, have already turned out a very large number 

 of steam-driven motor-cars, which are so largely in use in 

 unskilled hands that it shows that they have already solved the 

 problem to some extent. 



The directions in which the two classes of motors require further 

 development are, for the internal combustion motors, the 

 satisfactory and inodorous use of the heavier oils, and in this 

 perhaps Herr Diesel may help us with his wonderfully 

 economical motor improvements in the clutch mechanism, for 

 with all internal combustion engines up to the present it has 

 been found impossible to start the motor when coupled to the 

 driving-wheels of the car ; and in the case of the steam motor 

 the simplification of the boiler, the boiler feed mechanism, the 

 inodorous and noiseless burning of heavy oils as fuel, improved 

 condensers, methods of lubricating the pistons and valves 

 so as to avoid oil passing back to the boiler with the 

 condensed water, and the rendering of all processes of 

 boiler feed and fuel feed mechanism completely automatic so 

 as not to require the attention of the driver. On points common 

 to both classes, although much has been done, further improve- 

 ment is required in the methods of transmitting the power from 

 the motor to the driving-wheels. In the case of the steam cars, 

 where this has been done by single reduction, using chain, 

 pinion, and sprockets, very efficient and noiseless transmission 

 has already been obtained, but up to the present in most of the 

 internal combustion engines where more than two cylinders have 

 to be employed, it has been found necessary to arrange the crank 

 shaft of the motor at right angles to the axle of the driving- 

 wheels, so that part of the transmission having to be through 

 bevel gear, this part has up to the present always been noisy. 

 In the providing of noiseless and efficient chain driving, the 

 manufacturer of cars has gained greatly by the high degree of 

 perfection to which these chains had already attained for bicycle 

 work. 



The recent great road races which have taken place in France 

 and elsewhere have shown that the motor-car can be driven 

 safely at a very high speed, already reaching in some cases 

 seventy miles an hour ; but to render this capacity for high 

 speed useful, not only must .special roads be provided on which 

 these high-speed cars can travel without danger to others and 

 with least slip and wear and tear of tyres, but a great deal 

 requires to be done in the improvement of the pneumatic tyres, 

 which at present get excessively hot, and therefore damaged by 

 these high-speed runs. At these high speeds the mechanical 

 work done on the material of which the outer covers of pneu- 

 matic tyres are composed is excessively high. It can probably 

 be reduced by increasing the diameter of the wheels, but, of 

 course, at the cost of increased weight and, to some extent, of 

 stability, for the side strains on the wheels of these cars when 

 swinging round curves of sharp radius are very great. 



Another direction in which mechanical invention is required 

 for the wheels of motor cars and wagons is a shoeing or protec- 

 tion of hard material of easily renewable character which can be 

 firmly and safely attached to the outside of the tyre covers to 

 take the wear and cutting action caused by the driving strain and,, 

 by the action of the breaks on sudden stops. 



The late R. W. Thomson, of Edinburgh, made good progress 

 some thirty years ago in providing steel shoeing for the solid, 

 rubber tyres he then used, and the problems of providing the 

 same for pneumatic tyres ought to be no harder than those he 

 then successfully encountered. 



One of the topics which has been most strongly discussed, 

 during the last year has been the position which this country 

 holds relatively to other countries as regards its commercial 

 supremacy in engineering matters. A few years back we were 

 undoubtedly ahead of the world in most branches of mechanical 

 engineering, but owing to the huge development of mechanical 

 engineering in America and Germany, we are certainly being 

 run very hard by these countries, and everyone is looking for 

 means to help us to regain our old position. In endeavouring 

 to learn from America we see that, although the workmen in 

 that country receive higher wages than they do here, and although 

 the cost of some of the materials is higher than it is here, their 

 manufacturers manage to deliver engines, tools, and machinery 

 of all classes of excellent quality at a price which appears to our 



NO. 1664, VOL. 64] 



