The Era of the Steam Coach

In England, the early 1820s saw the advent of the steam coach.

The first name in the story of these public vehicles — powered by engines much improved in comparison with those of the first years of the century — is that of Jules Griffith, designer and constructor of a bus which was the first ever to be put into regular public service for the transport of passengers. This was in 1822, three years before Stephenson built the first steam railway. These two methods of transport, developed at the same time, were to give rise to competition not only on technical level, but particularly in the commercial and financial fields.

Almost contemporary with Griffith were two other Englishmen, James and John Scott Russell, who ran a regular steam coach service between Glasgow and Paisley.

Goldsworthy Gurney ran a similar one between London and Bath", a distance of over 100 miles. His steam coach carried 18 passengers at a speed of 12.5 mph and weighed two tons. Its boiler was mounted at the rear and heated by coke, while its cylinders were under the chassis.

The development of the railway ran neck-to-neck in the progress-on-wheels race. The railway had some advantage as it offered its passengers more comfort and speed. Between 1834 and 1839 a number of attacks, verbal and physical, were made on steam coaches, particularly after the first serious road accident involving one — the coach collided with a pile of stones, probably placed there by its competitors, and ran off the road. The boiler exploded, causing death and injuries. Naturally, this gave rise to great public alarm.

In 1839, another accident — in which a steam coach ran over two people killing one — made Parliament take legislative action which seems almost incredible today. Steam coaches were permitted on the roads only if they did not exceed 10 mph, and a few years later the situation was made worse by what was called the Red Flag Act which obliged steam vehicles to be preceded by a walking man waving a red flag.

These measures, and more besides, combined with the genuine inferiority of road travel at that time compared with the railway, brought about the rapid decline of the steam coach in Great Britain, until it finally disappeared within a few years.

In France, at the same time a similar situation had developed, which resulted in the abandonment of the first coach service which ran between Paris and Versailles in 1835.

It is true that road travel by means of steam-driven vehicles was to show sporadic revivals in France, with the development of advanced vehicles, designed respectively by Lotz in 1860, and Albaret in 1865, and, later still, with the Obeissante - a distinctive vehicle built by Amedee Bollee. He designed and built a vehicle capable of speeds up to 25 mph and equipped with several completely new devices, such as a speed change by means of gears and independent front suspension. Later he produced an even more improved vehicle, La Mancelle, in which were evident certain ideas incorporated in the motor car — forward-mounted engine, rear driving wheels connected to the engine by a horizontal shaft, and a differential. Bollee was to make a small fortune with these machines, accepted with enthusiasm also in Austria and Germany, but enthusiasm for these machines soon died. This was also the fate of the steam coach constructed by Virgilio Bordino. The only Italian inventor in this field, Bordino, an engineer officer in the Sardinian army, made three vehicles, inspired by the English models.

Thus ends the glorious period of the steam coach, glorious above all for the passion with which certain far-sighted men fought so many years ago, for the triumph of their precocious ideas.

But now we must go back in time to trace the origins of what is today, as it has been for many years, the authentic engine of the motor — the internal combustion engine.

Unit 3