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The Stanley Steamer
Water and fire. These are the ingredients of one of the simplest power recipes that mankind has ever devised. Use the fire
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The Stanley Steamer
Water and fire. These are the ingredients of one of the simplest power recipes that mankind has ever devised. Use the fire to heat the water to a boil. Wrap enough equipment around the entire arrangement to contain it, and channel the resulting steam. See that the expanding steam pushes something. You have an engine!
Hero of Alexandria tried this in the year 2 B.C. and ended up with a simple rotating sphere. In the early eighteenth century James Watt improved on some two thousand years of steam experimenting and perfected a workable steam engine.
In 1896 the Stanley brothers put a steam engine in a car and created a legend. But they were not the first, not by over a hundred years. Their car was, in a sense, the last of a species, a final flowering like the last dinosaur, extinct but not forgotten.
The steam engine was mankind's first truly independent power source. If the sun was cloud-hidden; if the winds ceased blowing; if the rivers ran dry; human beings could still light a fire and make wheels turn. With the ability to make a wheel turn at will, mankind made the first and most significant step toward the development of an independent vehicle.
The first completely self-powered vehicle to run on a road appeared in France in 1769. Actually the first car! Called a "Road Wagon" by its builder, Nicholas Cugnot, it had three wheels and a huge pressure boiler hanging out in front. It was heavy and clumsy, but it moved. It moved at the astounding speed of 2 1/2 miles per hour and could run a distance of perhaps one hundred feet before stopping to generate more steam. Fascinated by the possibilities, inventors in several countries built steam-driven vehicles.
In America, Nathan Reed of Massachusetts designed a steam car. That was 1790. In 1804 the first amphibian, a steam river dredge with wheels, was built. The first steam car built for sale to the general public was manufactured by Sylvester Roper in 1860. Stop to think and you will realize that it was before the Civil War. Roper was followed by Richard Dudgeon and the Carhart brothers and a whole team of American inventors who saw the possibilities of steam.
In France, Bollee and De Dion headed a list of Gallic experimenters, but it was the British who first came up with a practical road vehicle. Richard Trevithick produced a massive (about eight tons!) machine in 1803 which created a sensation. One after another, British engineering firms built various types of steam cars and buses. Bus service between cities flourished. Some buses carried twenty-two passengers and made four trips a day. These monsters were called road locomotives, and must have been an impressive sight on the quiet English roads. Some of them resembled huge stagecoaches with the addition of a smokestack. One even attained the speed of 9 mph.
But in 1865 Parliament passed the Red Flag Law. The owners of horse-drawn bus lines and railroads realized that transport on the roads by a self-powered vehicle could mean financial disaster for them. Their lobby was successful. From 1865 on, a self-powered machine on a highway was required to drive at speed of no more than 3 mph, with a man carrying a red flag walking in front. This was the end of the steam buses.
With no such inhibiting law in America, many engineers experimented with steam cars. The most successful were the Stanley brothers. In 1896 they gave up a photographic plate c