Posted
on June 1, 2014
In
the 1800s there were lots of people living in cities, and lots of
those people had carriages of various types and sizes drawn by
horses. I sometimes try to imagine what busy city streets would've
been like back then!
There
would have been a lot of horse poop, I bet!
When
the auto-mobile – named because it could propel itself and didn't
have to be pulled by a horse – was first invented, there were
several types of engines. One of the biggies was the steam engine,
and of course there was also the internal-compulsion engine run by
gasoline.
Today's
birthday twins designed, manufactured, and sold steam-engine autos.
Because their names were Edgar and Freelan Stanley, their cars were
called Stanley Steamers.
The
Stanley brothers produced their first car in 1897, and in the next
few years they were the leading manufacturer of cars in the U.S. Here
you see Freelan Stanley and his wife at the top of Mount Washington
in New Hampshire, the highest peak in the northeastern U.S. – they
took the two hours to drive up to the top as a publicity stunt for
their auto business.
The
Stanleys sold this original auto design to Locomobile and did a
complete re-design for their own new business, the Stanley Motor
Carriage Company. Their new design was twin cylinder engines geared
to the axle for the back wheels. With this design, they needed no
transmission, no clutch, no driveshaft....But they did need some
gasoline, apparently, to run the vaporizing gasoline burner
underneath the boilers.
By
the way, there were safety valves, and even modern engineers agree
that the steam-boilers were safer than we might imagine. No Stanley
boiler ever exploded in use!
The
Stanley Steamer used to race cars with early internal-combustion
engines—and the steam-powered cars won! In fact, one world record
stood for five years, despite the rapid development of better and
better cars that was occurring in the industry.
You
may wonder why the internal-combustion engine ended up winning out
over the steam engine cars. In the decade of the 1910s, the
internal-combustion engines improved their efficiency and power
greatly. Also, the electric starter was invented, and it made
gasoline-powered cars much safer than they had been when they were
started by hand-cranking. Finally, Henry Ford's innovative production
style with the assembly line drastically reduced the cost of his
internal-combustion cars.
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Impressive, thanks for the post.
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