Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

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