Raw History of the Automobile - 4

Still Lacking a Propulsion System

When the progressive technical trend of the ancient age found itself braked during the middle ages, pretty much nobody seemed to care anymore about elevating the concept of animal-drawn carriage to the level of the automobile. Everything reached a kind of sufficient stage: moving vehicles were available, what else could anybody wish for in terms of mobility?

Self-propelled vehicles, maybe? But this was a very difficult and special question. Inspired by sailing ships, some have built wind-powered vehicles. Those were used in China around the year 500 AD, as some occidental travelers mention them. Also, the Emperor Yuan of Liang wrote about described a wind-driven carriage which was able to carry thirty people at once in the Book of the Golden Hall Master when he was still the crown prince Xiao Yi. There is another mention, showing that a wind-propelled vehicle was bulit for the Chinese Emperor Yang of Sui in 610.

In Europe, nothing special happened regarding the subject, until Guido da Vigevano (Italian physician and inventor) got the idea of putting a windmill on a moving platform aiming to obtain a vehicle around the year 1335. Obviously, he had a good understanding of the gears role in modulating the traction force and he also took care about allowing the mill to pivot on the platform in order to catch the wind on the best direction. Thereby, the vehicle would be able to move anyway its driver would like no matter where the wind was blowing from. However, there is no evidence that such a vehicle was ever built and it worked.

Another Italian, the engineer Roberto Valturio, sketched a wind-powered vehicle around 1472. Again, we are talking here about the advanced solution of a propeller-driven mechanism, not about sails. Because military investments were the most likely to receive consistent funding from states, he defined his vehicle as a war machine. Since the original drawings are showing the vehicle in a strangely altered perspective, I preferred to illustrate down here the concept of Roberto Valturio’s vehicle in a more intuitive graphic manner, including some see-thru zones. This vehicle was never built, also.

Since Leonardo da Vinci didn’t want to rely on the wind for moving a vehicle, he approached the subject from the idea of a spring mechanism propulsion. His project of a self-propelled cart was included in the Codex Atlanticus (12 volume bound set of drawings and texts). Very important technical details: the propulsion mechanism included a balance wheel (like those in the clockworks) to ensure an uniform development of power, and a differential on the axle for a proper control of the propulsion when the vehicle was turning.

As far as we know, a cart like this wasn’t built anytime during the 15nd century, but it was materialized in 2004 by a team of enthusiasts. Eight months' work by computer designers, engineers and joiners has proved something that had been doubted for centuries: the machine sketched by Leonardo da Vinci was able to move! "It was - or is - the world's first self-propelled vehicle", said Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, who oversaw the project.

At the middle of the second millennium, the Flemish scientist Simon Stevin (1548–1620) sticked to the wind-powered vehicles idea, so he build several of those. On 16 February 1583 he enrolled, under the name Simon Stevinus Brugensis (meaning "Simon Stevin from Bruges"), at Leiden University, which had been founded by William the Silent in 1575. 

There, he befriended William the Silent's second son and heir Prince Maurice. After William the Silent's assassination and Prince Maurice's assumption of his father's office, Stevin became the principal advisor and tutor of Prince Maurice.

Around 1600 he built a kind of land-yacht propelled by sails (zeilwagen) for Maurice, Prince d’Orange. Here you can see it as shown in an engraving signed by Jacques de Gheyn. Historical sources mention the Prince d’Orange, together with 26 passengers, travelled onboard this vehicle from Scheveningen to Petten faster than in a horse-drawn carriage.

Back to China: in 1678, the Flemish Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688, konwn there as Nan Huairen) became close friends with the Kangxi Emperor, who frequently requested his teaching in mathematics, philosophy and music. He also built a demonstrative model (about 60 cm long) of a steam-powered vehicle that confirmed the viability of using steam as a source of motive power. In fact, we are deling with an elementary kind of steam turbine, here. The enclosed illustration shows a toy reproduction of this vehicle produced by Brumm.

Speculations are also mentioning a steam-jet vehicle idea attributed to Isaac Newton (1642-1726) around 1680. Allegedly, the proeminent physicist sketched a kind of steam-propelled vehicle as an application of the action-reaction principle. The steam jet here doesn’t push on a turbine wheel, like in the case of Father Verbiest’s cart, but provides a reactive thrust (so, some serious steam was needed to get the whole thing moving!).

Nothing like this has been actually built and there are some good reasons why. Among those: excepting the manually-actuated valve on the steam jet nozzle, there wasn’t shown any other control device for the pressure and the temperature of the boiler. Also, nothing about steering, braking and stopping. Obviously, the minimal technical requirements for such a vehicle to work properly are far from being met in this case.

In the end of this rather awkward and dull chapter one idea emerges: the steam-age was on its way. However, as we will see, the early applications of the steam power were not addressed to the creation of the automobile. During the next couple of centuries, the animal traction for personal vehicles was still considered good enough.