EARLY MOTORISTS

Evening Star, Issue 22455, 28 September 1936, Page 10

EARLY MOTORISTS

NO EASY PATH HATED BY POPULACE One day in the last year of the nineteenth a country gentleman might have been seen standing in the middle of an . English village street strewing the road with tin tacks and drawing pins to puncture the tyres of passing motor cars. He was the squire of the place, but he was more—he was a symbol, a symbol of the world’s reception of the invention that was to transform the twentieth century and make it utterly unlike any that had preceded it. . ' For if ever the world showed its hatred of a new thing, banded together to hound it out of existence, persecuted its sponsors, that thing was the motor car. For a century men had racked their brains to supersede the horse; yet, when at last the motor car was invented, it seemed that universal hatred and fear of it would drive the world hack to dog carts again. CUGNOT’S INVENTION. The long and eventful story begins in 1770. No.thought of joy riding entered the mind of the Frenchman, Nicholas Cugnot, in that year. He was trying to make an artillery tractor. His car went at two and a-half miles an hour, sometimes, but it had to stop every 100 ft along the road to make the steam that propelled it. After him came many who tried to put the steam engine on the road, but the spirit of the age and its best engineers were with the new railways, and nothing much happened until the great year of destiny, 1885. In that year a German named Benz put one of his paraffin-driven gas engines into a dog cart. He used belts that were switched, from pulley to pulley to vary the gear, and .the dog cart moved forward at a snail’s pace. A few hours’ journey away a fellow countryman, Gottlieb Daimler, was inventing an engine run not by paraffin, but by petrol. He fitted it to a bicycle and to boats. . The motor boats came to Pans for ah exhibition, and a representative of a firm of woodworkers, Panhard and Levasseur, saw them on the Seine. The firm obtained Daimler’s French patents and made the first real _ motor cars. Thus the two antagonistic nations of Europe each played its part in producing the car, although neither Government seems to have been particularly interested. Herr Daimler, who was thus put on the path to immortality, was a true inventor, even greasy and unkempt. His experiments were carried on in shuttered premises. The police regarded him with suspicion as a possible anarchist making bombs. _ They did not know that he was making a bomb that would blow their world of 1885 higher than the largest bomb that had ever been heard of. The enemies of motorists were:— 1. The police and authorities generally. 2. Horses. 3. Roadside dwellers. 4. Dogs. 5. The country gentry, 6. The roads. 7. The dust. 8. Last, but not least, the cars themselves. The car came into a myriad of little self-contained rural worlds in which you knew everybody in a 10-mile dog cart radius and no one else. As soon as the cars appeared in force on British roads they were the centre of raging uproar. The great highways—the famous Bath road, the Great North road, were in a decline. They were practically no better than the worst country road to-day, and almost as narrow. They were main roads no more since the coaches had died, merely being the way of occasional commumcntion between one village and the next. Hogs grunted across them unmolested only 40 years ago. People slept on them. \ Then suddenly the slumbering l English countryside was turned into _ a Sahara. Every car on these primitive tracks created vast dust' clouds. ' Old motorists describe them still. • You could stand on a hilltop and see them here, there, and everywhere, rolling above the trees, and each one was a motorist travelling like a genie in his own cloud. CLOUDS FILL THE AIR. Motorists arranging a meeting with a motoring friend could tell he had gone on, though they were a quarter of an hour late, because his dust cloud still filled the air. The driver could not see the road for dust. He steered by the tops of the trees. It was even suggested that drivers should carry tall poles with flags on the top to enable them to see each other coming above the all-prevailing dust cloud. Soon loud complaints arose on all the roads that netted Britain. It was the cry of the householders by the roadside, who were being smothered in the dust. They brought out their watering carts and tried watering the streets, but that did not last long. They tried spreading oil on the dust to bind it, and it was not a success. At last a young county council official suggested tarring the roads. _ There were three schools of opposition ; (a) The financial school. It said that there was not enough money in the whole country to cover all the roads with tar. (b) The economic school. It said that there was not enough tar in the whole world for the job. (c) The piscatorial school. It said that all the fish would be poisoned by the water draining off the tarred roads. But the tarring did not happen quickly. In the interval motoring was persecuted at every hand. The police, egged on by fox hunting magistrates, would stop at nothing to obtain the conviction of a motorist. In many villages carpentering nails, horseshoe nails, hobnails out of boots, were strewn in the roads to puncture tyres. Innumerable early motorists had their tyres slashed. In several countries there was a newspaper campaign against motor cars. Artists drew pictures of cars blowing up sky-high. This alarmed the ignorant among motorists and it was a common thing to see a party of them dismount after an engine had backfired and stand a little way apart waiting for it to blow up. What miseries were not supplied for them by the state of the roads and the attitude of the public the motorists supplied from their own resources. Can you conjure up what the conditions really were? It was a fiddling, exasperating job to get the engine to start. Sometimes they lit a little fire of methylated spirit under the carburetter. Another good tip was to wrap hot cloths round it. But it was all very complicated. There were no garages You bought your petrol from an oil shop or a paint shop. There

were no windscreens. You wore one of two garments, either a long mackintosh cloak from neck to heel, or else a horrid-smelling natural goatskin coat. You were always breaking down and trying to get ignorant blacksmiths to extract a valve from a cylinder. When your tyre came off on the steeply cambered roads passing carters gave you no help, but only said jeeringly: Use the whip, guv’nor.” Spare parts were almost unobtainable, and rapid changes in motoring ideas made your car obsolete as soon as it was built. In 1894, for instance, one of the greatest motor car pioneers swore that pneumatic tyres would never be any .good, and that the future was with tyres nlled with hay and straw. And yet, despite all difficulties, the motor car went on developing and finding new buyers until—the fateful year or 1903. TERRIBLE SETBACK, In that year the whole glory of motoring progress was eclipsed, and it even seemed to some that the motor car might disappear from the roads of all countries. This _is how it came about. A great Paris to Madrid race was organised, and that year cars capable of high speeds were entered, but the drivers did not know how to control them. What was more, no attempt was made to control the spectators. Soon the tale of deaths and maimings began to pour into Paris. The route was like a battlefield. No one will ever knoWj exactly how many were injured, but 14 were killed—three drivers, three mechanics, and eight spectators. The race was stopped by the French Government at Bordeaux. Horse die-hards were overjoyed. Motor car stocks dropped and dropped. Orders were cancelled. People sold their cars. Slowly, -very slowly, the motor car crept back again into favour. The first mechanically-driven buses—clanking, jolting, steam-spouting horrors, the victims of jibes like “ Where’s your nosebag?” appeared