EARLY PREJUDICE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22391, 11 April 1936, Page 5 (Supplement)

EARLY PREJUDICE

EIRST MOTOE-CAKS TACKS STREWN ON ROADS OWNERS SENT TO "COVENTRY" One day in the last years of the nineteenth century a country gentleman might have been seen standing in tho middle of a village street, strewing tho road with tintacks and drawing pins to puncture tho tyres of passing motorcars, writes C. A. Lyon in a London journal. Ho was the squire of the place, but he was more, he was a symbol. A symbol of the world's reception of tho invention that was to transform the twentieth ccnturly and make it utterly unlike any that had preceded it. For if ever the world showed its hatred to a new thing banded together to hound it out of existence, persecuted its sponsors, that thing was the motorcar. For a century men had racked their brains to supersede the horse. Yet, when at last the motor-car nas invented, it seemed that universal hatred and fear of it would drive the world back to their dog-carts again. Two Miles an Hour Tho long and eventful saga starts in 1770. No thought of joy-riding entered tho mind of tho Frenchman, Nicholas Cugnot, in that year. He was trying to make an artillery tractor. His car went at two and a-half miles an hour, sometimes, but it had to stop every hundred feet along the road to make the steam that propelled it. After him came many who tried to put the steam engine on the road, but tho spirit of the age and its best engineers were with tho new railways, and nothing much happened until the great year of destiny, 1885. In that year a German, named Benz, whoso heavy beard stood him in good stead until windscreens were invented, put ono of his paraffin-driven gasengines into a dog-cart. Ho used belts that were switched from pulley to pulley to vary tho gear, and tho dogcart moved forward at snail's pace. A few hours' journey away a fellowcountryman, Gottlieb Daimler, was inventing an engino run not by paraffin, but by petrol. He fitted it to a bicycle and to boats. Tho motor-boats came to Paris for an exhibition and a representative of a firm of woodworkers Panhard and Levassor, saw them on tho Seine.. The firm secured Daimler's French patents and made the first real motor-cars. Thus, tho two antagonistic nations of Europe each played their part in producing the car, although neither Government seems to have been particularly interested. Suspected oi Anarchy

Herr Daimler, who was thus put on the path to immortality, was a true inventor, ever greasy and unkempt. His experiments were carried on in shuttered premises. The police regarded him with suspicion as a possible anarchist making bombs. They did not know that old Gottlieb was making a bomb that would blow their 1885 world higher than the biggest bomb that' had ever been heard of.

Soon France and Germany were racing each other to produce cars. At first they were very much like horse carriages. They had the traditional smug curves, the oil lamps, even the wicker-work scabbard at the side for one's umbrella.

In June, 1895, Britain, ten years behind France and Germany because of its red flag and walking pace restrictions, saw its first car, a PanhardLevassor, delivered to Southampton for the Hon. Evelyn Ellis, of Datchet, Buckinghamshire.

London's First Experience. Londoners waited yet another year to see their first car. It formed part of the Lord Mayor's Show of 1896. As soon as it passed Temple Bar particulars' wfc taken of it by a police officer, this being the first but not the last time, a motor-car had figured in the records of the Metropolitan Police. Although motor-cars were permitted within the city on that day, there was no authority to proceed beyond. As soon as tho new horseless carriages began to become common in the late 'nineties their troubles began. The enemies of motorists were: —(1) The police and authorities generally. (2) Horses. (3) Roadside dwellers. (4) Dogs. (5) The country gentry. (6) The roads. (7) The dust. (8) Last, but not least, the cars themselves. _ The car camo into a myriad of little self-contained rural worlds in which you knew everybody in a ten-mile dog-cart radius, and no one else. The opposition to motoring in these worlds was not a half-joke, it was a serious thing. Cut Off by Aunt

1 know a motorist of good social standing in Yorkshire whose neighbours ceased to invito him to their houses because of his motoring activities. I know another whose aunt cut him out of her will because ho took to motoring. As soon as the cars appeared in force on British roads they were tho centre of raging uproar. And yet, in spite of all difficulties, the motor-ear went on developing and finding new buyers until —the fateful year of 1903. lu that year the whole glory of motoring progress was eclipsed, and it even seemed to some that the motorcar might disappear from tho roads of all countries. This is how it came about.

A great Paris to Madrid race was organised, and I hat year cars capable of quito high speeds were entered, but tho drivers did not know how to control them. What was more, no attempt was made to control the spectators. Route Like a Battlefield Soon the tale of deaths and maimings began to pour into Paris. . The route was like a battlefield. No ono will ever know exactly how many were injured, but fourteen were killed — three drivers, three mechanics, and eight spectators. Tho race was stopped by the French Government at Bordeaux. Horso die-hards were in transports. Motor-ear stocks dropped and dropped. Orders were cancelled. Peoplo sold their cars. Slowly, very slowly, tho motorcar crept back again into favour. The first mechanically driven buses —clanking, jolting, steam-spouting horrors, tho victims of gibes like " Where's your nosebag?"—appeared about 1901.