FAST STEAMER

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32076, 26 August 1969, Page 15

FAST STEAMER

In the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers—the Paris equivalent of the London Science Museum—stands a curious vehicle which is a cross between an upturned boat and a fairground joy-

rider. v In fact, it was once the fastest car in the world. It was called ‘The Easter Egg” and in its exposed cockpit a French engineer named Leon Serpollet rode to immortality one day in 1902 by driving at 75 m.p.h., although he held the record for less than a year. What made ‘The Easter Egg” doubly remarkable was that it was powered by steam. Serpollet was convinced that steam, properly harnessed, was the motive power of the future. In 1890, he was one of the first to use liquid fuel in a flash-steam boiler, and took the car on a run from Paris to Lyons to prove its speed and practicality. Serpollet was one of the first designers to realise that steam cars need not be any more cumbersome than petrol vehicles; indeed, his ability

;to make light-weight steam i engines left him about the i only European champion of i the marque as, one by one, i his rivals dropped out or were I won over by the petrol eiu - gine.

It was left to Serpollet to make possible the European steam car’s last challenge to petrol. The engine in ‘The Easter Egg” was a masterpiece of delicate precision, but, even in this, too much fuel was needed to produce too little power and the record was soon broken by a whole string of petrol-driven cars, and finally by the last of the steam-ers—-an American Stanley. The Stanley’s speed of 127 m.p.h. achieved in 1905, stood for years. But when the record went, Leon Serpollet was dead. He died in 1907, little guessing that, in 60 years, the wheel would have turned full circle, and steam cars would be once again seriously considered as the vehicle most likely to drive into the twenty-first century.