Richard Trevithic designed a steam carrige long be fore Stevensons Rocket. What would have been the impact of steam being widley used on the roads? I know the roads would have to be improved. From what i understand steam road vehicles were squashed not by technical difficulties but fear of high presure steam and lobbying from stagecoach and cannal companies.
Steam Road Transport
- Thread starter Peg Leg Pom
- Start date
1) anything on rails is more efficient than the same thing on even a good road.
2) Macadam doesn't invent a (vaguely affordable) all weather road until 1820. Steam tractors on a mud road are going to be pretty much useless.
So. No.
As I said the roads would need to be improved (a lot). I have seen film of a reconstruction of a steam bus. Steam power would be most useful in towns. Over long distances of course rail is more efficient. Also rich young men would then as now want the latest thing. Would see an earlier development of the steam car, would also avoid the law restricting self powered vehicles to 6 m.p.h behind a walking man carrying a red flag.
Umm... 6mph is pretty darn fast for an early steam tractor, even on paved road... no?
Trevithics experiment was the start. My question is what would have happened if over the next 20 or 30 years development had continued. I'm not talking about traction engines but steam buses and lorries in towns. Steam lorries were used up until the 1930's. I could see a railway company developing comtainers that could be loaded on the back of a steam wagon at the factory, driven to the freight yard. lifted by steam crane onto a railway goods wagon, taken accross the country to the nearest frieght yard to the customer, put on another steam wagon and delivered to the customers door. There is only so much weight horses can pull. If road steam had been developed alongside rail there would be a lot of changes.
??? And early steam engines can pull more? You do realize that early steam engines were like 5hp, maybe, and anything that was a lot more powerful wouldn't fit on a 'lorry'.
I suspect you'd find a team of of 20 Clydesdales could pull a lot more than you think.
Yes, you had steam lorries until 1930s - but I'll bet you didn't have them before, oh, 1890 or so. The tech needed for a high-power compact steam-engine just isn't there yet. AFAIK. I'm not a steam-buff, but...
No they didn't, but there was also very little development of steam road transport. If you invest the same sort of effort into it as you put into rail you will get usable engines far sooner. A four horsepower engine will power a car in a town if you can make it small enough. I can see no technical reason steam lorries can't available by the 1870's. The problem was more political than mechanical. With the law at the time against such machines there is no funding. Prevent the legal problems and people are going to experiment. Most will go bust but someone will produce a usable engine. Once the concept is proven more companies will enter the field. You only have to look at aviation to see how quickly a new technology developes once proven. 10 years 9 months from the Wright Flyer to the first carrier(seaplane) airstrike.
Highlander
Banned
I wonder - could something like this catch on first in Europe, than move on to America? Didn't they tend to have better roads?
Or rather, maybe on the more settled East Coast?
Or rather, maybe on the more settled East Coast?
Can't see any reason why not, though Britain tended to take the lead in steam technology. Also if the Prince of Wales buys a steam car they would instantly become the thing for the rich young men to have. The honourable Sir Chinless-Wonder must have the latest fastest Steam Car in production.
Bill Cameron
Banned
Peg Leg Pom,
Stuff and nonsense.
For a given amount of money, you can build far more miles of rails than "good roads". Hell, even in an urban setting, horse traction, cable traction, electrical traction, and steam traction all still used and still use rails.
Rails are cheaper by an order of magnitude. They can be laid faster, can be repaired faster, can be inspected faster, and can carry much heavier loads than roads. What's more, given the laughable horsepower available to early steam engines - your lawnmower has more - rails allow more drawing power for a given horsepower.
All building "good roads" will do is soak up money that could be put to better use laying rails.
Given the engineering realities, this idea is a non-starter.
Bill
Thande
Donor
They tried it in 1803 in OTL with a steam carriage service around London, but it failed because it was more uncomfortable (the heat from the steam engine) and wasn't any cheaper than horse-drawn transport.
When I wanked steam in LTTW I did it through the idea that steam tractors prove useful to the French Republican Army, and due to the prevalence of coaling stations and better roads to support that, they end up coming into civilian use too. Same way that passenger aircraft really took off after WW2 because now suddenly everyone had a load of concrete airstrips built for the war.
When I wanked steam in LTTW I did it through the idea that steam tractors prove useful to the French Republican Army, and due to the prevalence of coaling stations and better roads to support that, they end up coming into civilian use too. Same way that passenger aircraft really took off after WW2 because now suddenly everyone had a load of concrete airstrips built for the war.
Not necessarily. At the time Britain was mainly fighting in Spain, France and India. In all cases, there is no ready supply of coal and wood won't do half as well. You thus have a choice of shipping fuel out to the army along or using the grass that is on the spot as well as local animals. The reliability of the latter is almost one hundred per cent as well as being able to cope with the poor roads in two of the regions. Looks like a no brainer to me.
You also have to take into consideration that most if not all British Generals were ex infantry or cavalry so if someone did sponsor a steam tractor and send some of them out they would probably organise things so that it failed and thus they could prove that it was useless. Steam engines are for artisans not gentlemen.
For a steam carriage service in London, I think it is more enlightening to look at the the 1830s and Walter Hancock's work. He attempted to start a carriage service with his steam omnibuses for several times, until 1836-37, in the end running regularly for five months and carrying thousands of passengers (according his own calculations his four carriages ran for a total of nearly 4200 miles, with almost 13000 passengers).
I think it can be said he was wildly successful given the constraints of the steam vehicles of the time, achieving a modicum of reliability and an average speed in excess of 10 mph even in longer journies. He even sold one of his carriages abroad, to Austria, thereby inaugurating the history of the export of British motor cars. But, apparently, in economy he could never compete with horse-drawn traffic even if people (and horses) in time become comfortable with his vehicles. The carriages were hand-made with very expensive materials and parts, were frequently out of order and burned a lot of coke and expended a lot of water. Hancock, who had only modest resources, finally had to give up.
Purely from the technical point of view, I would say one could start feeder routes to railway stations in London and other cities successfully from the mid-1830s, using Hancock's models or something close to them and being as fast and reliable as the horse-drawn traffic. But it would be a losing proposition in terms of money and could only be kept up by wealthy (if eccentric) supporters or, say, at the expense of a profitable railway line.
But if it would be kept up, even at a loss, I guess in a decade or two technological progress would make the vehicles slowly even economically viable on their own.
Peg Leg Pom said:
The way I see it, path dependency as well as its ineconomy killed the early steam carriage. With all the resources poured to the railways circa 1820-50, the rocket-like (no pun intended) ascent of the railway establishment and even an actual fear (believe it or not) the railway promoters had for a successful steam carriage for common roads undermining their effort, the steam carriage as a tougher technological proposition never had a chance in Britain.
The railway companies quite certainly lobbied against the steam carriage, claiming that any resources used to promote it would be wasted and would hurt their own "great national undertaking". But the canal companies, in the end, were actually rooting for the steam carriage inventors and their supporters, because they quite rightly saw that the railway was the bigger threat. Look, for example, at the anti-railway propagandist Richard Cort, who drew his salary from the canal companies and the stage coach interest but allied in the mid-30s with Alexander Gordon, the persistent steam carriage publicist in public attacks towards the railway companies.
Coincidentally, I posted an excerpt of the inventor's 1838 book on his work with the vehicle in MacCauley's thread Samuel Morey, or: 1824, with a two-stroke engine. just now. I am due to write an article on the subject by the end of this week, to a small Finnish journal on the history of technology, and I just hang out here rather than work on it...
To be fair, though, it is only a matter of picking and parafrasing relevant parts of my earlier, unpublished texts on the issue.
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