Steam-Powered Road Vehicles
Credit for the first steam-powered road vehicle is given to Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, a French military engineer. The French minister of war, the Duc de Choiseul, commissioned Cugnot to build a steam carriage capable of transporting large artillery pieces. Cugnot's response was to build a heavy three-wheeled vehicle that carried no reserves of fuel or water. Consequently, it was very limited in its use, although it did perform as a carriage by carrying four passengers in Paris in 1770. It moved at only a walking pace and was considered impractical because, after the pressure diminished, the copper steam tank had to be refilled with water and a fire had to be built under it to develop more steam.
Steam engines use the heat of combustion to boil water, converting it into steam vapor. By this action, its volume is expanded greatly, creating pressure. The resulting pressurized steam is then transferred to an engine, where it is used to push a piston; a crankshaft is used to convert the reciprocating motion of the moving piston into rotary power that can be used to turn lathes or other machine tools, or, as in Cugnot's application, to propel a vehicle. The greatest drawback of the steam engine is its inefficiency. Much of the potential energy of the burning fuel is converted to heat, and more is lost in the transfer of the steam to the engine. Also, other than building an engine roughly to the size considered appropriate to its proposed use, it is extremely difficult to equate the amount of fuel burned to the amount of energy needed; obviously, this adds to its inefficiency.
Cugnot developed at least two subsequent models, but his mentor, the Duc de Choiseul, was removed from office in about 1771. As a result, Cugnot's steam-powered carriages were abandoned and his work languished until the British developed steam carriages at the turn of the century.
Credit for the first practical steam carriage is often given to Englishman Richard Trevithick, who drove his carriage in 1801. His invention was essentially a four-wheel stagecoach equipped with a steam engine. Austrian Joseph Bozek and several British inventors followed Trevithick's lead. In the 1820s and 1830s in England, several carriages ran a service between Cheltenham and Gloucester, attaining speeds of up to 14 miles per hour (22 kph) and carrying up to 22 passengers. Among the notable Britishers was James Nasmyth who, at age 19, built a steam-powered carriage that was the model of efficiency for its time. The most successful of these early British steam-carriage makers was Goldsworthy Gurney, whose carriages carried 3,000 passengers over 3,500 miles (5,631 km) without a serious accident.
Despite these successes, steam carriages were noisy, tended to scare horses, dirtied the air with smoke, and scattered hot sparks that set fire to crops and wooden bridges. These early British carriages were also opposed by those who wished to maintain the supremacy of horse-powered haulage. Due to the problems mentioned above and faced with active opposition from various other competitors, the British government passed several laws that made it difficult for steam carriages to compete. One of these laws required that each carriage be preceded by a man waving a red flag; another law restricted their speed to 4 miles per hour (6 kph). These laws, often modified but never repealed, stifled English efforts to develop steam carriages and remained in effect in England until 1896. By this time, engineers in other countries--notably France and Germany--had developed carriages powered by gas engines, supplanting the steam engine as the power plant of choice for self-propelled vehicles.
In the United States, credit for the first steam-powered vehicle is given to Oliver Evans, who built a machine powered by a steam engine to dredge the Philadelphia harbor in 1805. Evans built the dredge on the shore and coupled its steam engine to power not only its paddle-wheel, but the wheels that moved the machine over land as well. Evans's Orukter Amphibolos, as he called his creation, propelled itself to the river's edge and supplied its own power on the water, becoming the first vehicle known to travel on both land and water.
Although many Americans, such as J. N. Carhart, Richard Dudgeon, Sylvester Roper, and Ransom Eli Olds (1864-1950), developed steam-powered automobiles, the most successful U.S. manufacturers were the twins Francis Stanley and Freelan Stanley, who built their first steam-powered car in 1898. In 1906, the brothers built a steam-powered car that set a world's record for the fastest mile--28.2 seconds, which is more than 127 miles per hour (204 kph). Despite this success, the public did not wholeheartedly accept the steam automobile. Steam cars were hard to start and hard to operate. They were also impractical for long-distance travel, and the public was reluctant to embrace an automobile that required an open fire and hot steam for propulsion.
Francis Stanley was killed in an automobile accident in 1918; his brother was ill at the time, and the Stanley Motor Company built only a few automobiles after Francis's death. Instead, the company's engines were shipped to Europe where they were used extensively to pump water from the trenches at the front during the First World War. While the Stanley Steamer was a relatively successful automobile, continuing developments in gasoline -powered engines led to the abandonment of steam as a practical source of automotive power. After the war, Henry Ford 's "Tin Lizzie" dominated the automobile market in the United States. The public's aversion to steam-powered cars led to the bankruptcy of the Stanley Motor Company, which ceased production in 1924.
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