Who Really Invented the Automobile? by David Richard Beasley

Author:David Richard Beasley [Beasley, David Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Davus Publishing
Published: 1996-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Repression of the Steam Carriage on the Continent and the Development of the Petroleum Automobile

Jean-Chretien Dietz of Belgium had inventive traits in common with the Gurney brothers of Cornwall. Like them he invented musical instruments, and like Goldsworthy Gurney he experimented with a steam carriage but met with technical success only after he corresponded with Goldsworthy. He built a drag with three wheels and a two-cylinder motor in 1832. He followed it in 1834 with a larger drag that pulled a train of carriages from Brussels to Anvers, and in 1836 with an eightwheeled carriage that operated around a central wheel.

While Jean-Chretien built steam carriages in his Brussels workshop, his son, Charles, built them in Paris. Charles won acclaim for driving about Paris with distinguished members of the Academie de l’Industrie in 1834, for instituting a regular passenger service from Paris to Versailles in 1835, and for offering a service with a six-wheeled carriage between Bordeaux and Libourne in 1840.

As for the Bordeaux passenger service, Charles and his brother Christian, who directed their Societe de Remorqueurs, encountered public hostility, particularly from the stagecoach drivers who wanted to break up their steam carriage and throw it into the Garonne River. Once Charles had to be rescued by police on the Suresne Bridge as he was defending himself with an iron bar. But with the official support of a prestigious committee whose members were from the Academie Royale des Sciences, the Dietz steam carriage attracted spectacular enthusiasm within three trips to Libourne. This response occurred despite a false rumor that a passenger had been thrown off and killed, and despite the temporary inconvenience caused by the mysterious disappearance of the coke at one of their refueling stops. Unfortunately for the future of the automobile, the Dietzes abandoned the service after a few months because they began to suffer from competition with the rapidly developing railways. Charles Dietz, half-ruined, returned to his Paris workshop where he diversified production into engines for vessels and turbines.

A Dietz descendant claimed that the Rothschild Paris-St. Germain railway, conceded in 1835 and finished in 1837, took away the steam carriage business: “The struggle between the road and the rail was already taking place and was the principal reason why Charles Dietz, forsaken by the public authorities, abandoned this service after several weeks.”89

There were other steam carriage promoters in France: Lotz who ran a small carriage between Nantes and Paris for a short time from 1865 to 1866,90 and, at the same time, Servet’s Compagnie d’Orleans whose five-ton carriage ran a special passenger service at night at 12 kilometers an hour between Grenoble and Lyons, a distance of 100 kilometers.

Obviously sensing a steam carriage revival, the minister of public works instituted an arrete or decree on April 20, 1866, which was not rescinded until March 10, 1899. Those persons establishing a steam carriage service for passengers or goods were required to submit a detailed itinerary, an assessment of the total weight of machinery and haulage and the average length of the drag and carriages to the regional prefect for approval.

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