It is believed that these sketches will be found peculiarly interesting and permanently valuable. Individually they are clear presentations of the achievements of some of the most distinguished engineers and inventors of the last hundred years. Collectively they present a complete story of the inception and gradual development of the automobile from the first clumsy steam wagons of Cugnot, Trevithick, Evans and others to the perfected carriage of to-day.
The chapter on The Origin and Development of the Automobile is a careful study and review of the conditions that attended the attempts to install the first common road steam carriages, the tentative experimenting with bicycles, tricycles and other vehicles in the middle of the last century and the renaissance of the last two decades. Several of the illustrations are from old and rare prints, and others are from photographs.
It is not possible to set down here all the authorities that have been consulted in the preparation of this work. Special acknowledgment, however, must be made to The Engineering Magazine for permission to use text and photographs, and to J. G. Pangborn for permission to use a great deal of interesting information regarding the early steam inventors contained in his work, The World's Railway, and to reproduce portrait sketches of Trevithick, Murdoch, and Read, from the same valuable volume.
He who would fully acquaint himself with the history of the inception and growth of the idea of travel by self-propelled vehicles on the public highways must go further back in the annals of the past than he is likely first to anticipate. Nearly three centuries ago men of mechanical and scientific turns of mind were giving attention to the subject, although their thoughts at that time were mostly confined to the realms of imaginative speculation. Even before that philosophers occasionally dreamed of what might be in some far off time. Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, looking into the distant future, made this prediction: "It will be possible to construct chariots so that without animals they may be moved with incalculable speed." It was several hundred years before men were ready to give practical attention to this idea, and about 1740 good Bishop Berkeley could only make this as a prediction and not a realization: "Mark me, ere long we shall see a pan of coals brought to use in place of a feed of oats."