[Gutenberg 41891] • Automobile Biographies / An Account of the Lives and the Work of Those Who Have Been Identified with the Invention and Development of Self-Propelled Vehicles on the Common Roads

FOREWORD

FOREWORD

In a large sense the history of the rise of the automobile has been a history of some of the foremost inventors, mechanical engineers, manufacturers and active business men of more than a full century. The subject of self-propelled vehicles on the common roads has enlisted the faculties of many men whose minds have been engrossed with the study and the solution of mechanical and engineering problems, purely from an absorbing love of science; it has had the financial support of those whose energies are constantly and forcefully exerted in the industrial and commercial activities of the age; it has received the merited consideration of those who regard as of paramount importance any addition to the sum of successful human endeavor and any influence that contributes to the further advance of modern civilization.

Along these lines of thought this book of Automobile Biographies has been prepared. On its pages are sketches of the lives and the work of those who have been most active in planning, inventing and perfecting the modern horseless highway vehicle, in adapting it to the public needs for pleasure or business and in promoting its usefulness and broadening the field of its utility.

Included herein are accounts of the pioneer inventors, the noted investigators and the contemporaneous workers who have helped to make the automobile in its many forms the most remarkable mechanical success of to-day and the most valuable and epoch-making addition to the conveniences of modern social, industrial and commercial life. These sketches have been carefully prepared from the best sources of information, works of reference, personal papers and so on, and are believed to be thoroughly accurate and reliable. Much of the information contained in them has been derived from exceedingly rare old volumes and papers that are not generally accessible, and it comes with a full flavor of newness. Much also has been acquired from original sources and has never before been given to the public.

The investigator into this subject will find, doubtless, to his very great surprise, that the story of the pioneer inventors, who, in the early part of the nineteenth century, experimented with the problems of the steam road carriage, has been recorded voluminously and with much detail. It was a notable movement, that absorbed the abundant attention of inventors, manufacturers and the public at large at that time.

Writers of that day recorded with a great deal of particularity the experimenting with boilers, engines, machinery and carriages, and the promoting of companies for the transportation of passengers and the hauling of goods. Modern students and historians of this subject find themselves greatly indebted to the writers of that epoch, like Gordon, Herbert and others, who preserved, with such painstaking care, for future generations, as well as for their own time, the account of the lives and labors of such men as Watt, Trevithick, Maceroni, Hancock and others. Every modern work upon this subject draws generously from those sources.

Concerning the later period from the middle of the century that has just ended, down to the present time, there is less concrete information, readily available. With the cessation of public interest in the matter and its general relegation into the background, by inventors, engineers and those who had previously been financial backers of the experimenting, writers ceased to give the subject the enthusiastic attention that they had before bestowed upon it. Records of that period are scant, partly because there was so little to record and partly because no one cared to record even that little.

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