Progress of Automobile Engineering

Abstract

FOR the James Forrest Lecture which he delivered at the Institution of Civil Engineers on May 1, Sir Henry Fowler took as his subject “The Progress of Automobile Engineering”. After a tribute to Forrest, whom he had known when a student, Sir Henry said that to-day the automobile industry is the fifth in point of size in Great Britain, while in the United States in 1928 the industry used no less than 6,000,000 tons of steel. The industry is also one of the greatest consumers of rubber, cotton and light alloys. The first self-propelled vehicle was that built in 1769 by Cugnot, and this was followed by those of Murdoch and Trevithick. Between 1823 and 1840, many patents were taken out for steam carriages, and the same period saw the experiments of Hancock, Gurney, Dance and others. Of the details then invented, the chain drive and differential gear of Hills and the steering gear of Gibbs has survived. Prohibitive tolls, vested interests and the railways, however, led to the abandonment of these early experiments and then came the “Red Flag” Act of 1865, with restrictions which were not removed until 1896. But the matter was taken further by the work of Otto in 1876 and Daimler in 1883, the latter giving us a power unit which has changed our lives, much as the railway did a century ago. The outstanding personality of the early period of automobile development was Levassor, whose arrangement of the various parts of a motor-car has been followed generally. Progress from about 1895 until 1901 can be traced from the records of trials, one of the most important of these being that held by the Royal Automobile Club in 1900, when eighty-three cars, most of foreign origin, started on a 1,000 miles run.