Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III
Forfatter: Archibald Williams
År: 1945
Serie: Engineering Wonders of the World
Forlag: Thomas Nelson and Sons
Sted: London, Edinburgh, Dublin and New York
Sider: 407
UDK: 600 eng- gl
With 424 Illustrations, Maps, and Diagrams
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322
ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD.
ing rail, stretching in perfect symmetry as far
as the eye can see. Here the equation of suc-
cess has two ever-varying quantities—the man
and the open road.
For the racing car must cover the roads at
motor races have always been a series of fierce
struggles, or that racing cars have invariably-
been enormously powerful machines. In the
primitive days of the motor vehicle the ques-
tion was not so much whether the car would
THE DE DION STEAM TRACTOR, THE FIRST CAR TO ARRIVE IN ROUEN
DURING THE “PETIT JOURNAL” TRIALS OF 1894.
The Comte de Dion is driving.
a faster average than ever express train has
need of; and it must work throughout at full
pressure, devouring space on the level, pulling
up with grinding brakes and skidding wheels
at the corners, sliding precariously round, to
jerk off again the moment the bonnet is
straight, with never a respite for the engine
or th© driver from the ceaseless bumps and
jars and. jolts, the quick accelerations and
abrupt slowings-down of four or five hundred
miles. And these are the mildest conditions :
if there be added a brutal, a “ harsh ” driver,
the ordeal becomes doubly hard. Yet many
a car of the present day can undergo six or
seven hours of this racketing, and come out
of the severest test of engine and gears which
can be imagined as fit as it was at the begin-
ning.
Conceive it—a ton of machinery forced over
the ordinary road at eighty, ninety, a hundred
miles an hour, with nothing to lessen the road
shocks except the tyres and the springs. To
the driver the credit of holding the car to the
road, but to the engineer the fame for build-
ing so marvellous a machine.
But it must by no means be imagined that
go fast as whether it would go at all; and the
enthusiasts who entered for the competitions
of the early period used the
same machines that they drove first
, , , „ Important
about the roads for ordinary Race
purposes. It is fifteen years
now since the first important race was held for
motor vehicles—though, strictly speaking, it
was not a race, as the question of speed did
not enter into the conditions. This was the
Paris-Rouen trial, organized by the Petit Jour-
nal, which offered a number of prizes for the
self-propelled vehicles that should best fulfil
the conditions of being “ easily handled, cheap
to run, and without danger to the occupants.”
In those days the number of cars actually on
the road was comparatively small ; but the
number of inventors beginning to take an in-
terest in the subject was large, and conse-
quently when the Parisian paper mooted the
scheme the entries were numerous—in fact,
reached the remarkable total of 102. But of
this number very few can be considered as
practical, being, like a large number of present-
day aeroplanes, epoch-making successes—on
paper. Some of the cars were stated to be