The London Steam Carriage was an early steam-powered road vehicle constructed by Richard Trevithick in 1803 and the world's first self-propelled passenger-carrying vehicle. Cugnot had built a steam vehicle 30 years previously, but that had been a slow-moving artillery tractor, not built to carry passengers.
In 1801, after James Watt's earlier patent on "a carriage propelled by a steam engine" had expired, Richard Trevithick constructed an experimental steam-driven vehicle (Puffing Devil) at Camborne, Cornwall. It was equipped with a firebox enclosed within the boiler, with one vertical cylinder, the motion of the single piston was transmitted directly to the driving wheels by means of connecting rods. It was reported as weighing 1,520 kg (3,350 lb) fully loaded, with a speed of 14.5 km/h (9 mph) on the flat. Trevithick ran this for several hundred yards up a hill with several people hanging on to it. Unfortunately, while the driver and passengers were in a pub celebrating the event, it set fire to a shed in which it had been left unattended, and was destroyed.
The following year, Trevithick and his partner, his cousin Andrew Vivian, patented a steam coach, the patent also describing other uses for Trevithick's new high-pressure engines. The vehicle was assembled at Felton's carriage works at Leather Lane, London, the engine components having been brought from Falmouth where they were made.
In 1831, Trevithick gave evidence to a Parliamentary select committee on steam carriages. [1]
Not all the details of the carriage are known but the drawings which accompanied the original patent have survived, as have contemporary drawings made by a naval engineer who was sent to examine it. Further information has also been obtained from eyewitness accounts.
The carriage had 8-foot-diameter (2.4 m) driving wheels which were intended to smooth out the road surfaces of the time, to help the fire from being extinguished by shaking. A forked piston rod reduced the distance between the single cylinder and the crankshaft and was considered a singular innovation at the time. Spring-operated valve gear was used to minimise the weight of the flywheel, overcoming one of the drawbacks of industrial steam engines.
The engine had a single horizontal cylinder which, along with the boiler and firebox, was placed behind the rear axle. The motion of the piston was transmitted to a separate crankshaft via the forked piston rod. The crankshaft drove the axle of the driving wheel (which was fitted with a flywheel) via a spur gear. The steam cocks (used to blow out water condensate from the steam chest), the force pump and the firebox bellows were also driven by the crankshaft. [2]
The patent shows two features which may have been incorporated by Trevithick to discourage unlicensed copies: if the engine had been assembled as per the patent drawings it would have been able to run only backwards; and if the water pump had been arranged to be driven by the valve spring as shown, it would have run unevenly if at all. [3]
It is reported that the coach builder William Felton charged £207 for building the coach (not including the engine) and that the cost of transporting the engine from Falmouth to London was £20 14s 11d. The cost of the engine is unknown. [3]
Following its completion, the London Steam Carriage was driven about 10 miles (16 km) through the streets of London to Paddington and back via Islington, with seven or eight passengers, at a speed of 4–9 miles per hour (6.4–14.5 km/h), the streets having been closed to other traffic.
On a subsequent evening, Trevithick and his colleague crashed the carriage into some house railings and, as a result of this, plus lack of interest in the carriage by potential purchasers, and its demonstrations having exhausted the inventors' financial resources, [4] it was eventually scrapped.
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be transformed, by a connecting rod and crank, into rotational force for work. The term "steam engine" is generally applied only to reciprocating engines as just described, not to the steam turbine. Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separated from the combustion products. The ideal thermodynamic cycle used to analyze this process is called the Rankine cycle. In general usage, the term steam engine can refer to either complete steam plants, such as railway steam locomotives and portable engines, or may refer to the piston or turbine machinery alone, as in the beam engine and stationary steam engine.
A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material to heat water in the locomotive's boiler to the point where it becomes gaseous and its volume increases 1,700 times. Functionally, it is a steam engine on wheels.
Richard Trevithick was a British inventor and mining engineer. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport, and his most significant contributions were the development of the first high-pressure steam engine and the first working railway steam locomotive. The world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place on 21 February 1804, when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales.
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Steam power developed slowly over a period of several hundred years, progressing through expensive and fairly limited devices in the early 17th century, to useful pumps for mining in 1700, and then to Watt's improved steam engine designs in the late 18th century. It is these later designs, introduced just when the need for practical power was growing due to the Industrial Revolution, that truly made steam power commonplace.
This article is a glossary of the main components found on a typical steam locomotive.
Under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives, 4-2-0 represents the wheel arrangement of four leading wheels on two axles, two powered driving wheels on one axle and no trailing wheels. This type of locomotive is often called a Jervis type, the name of the original designer.
A compound steam engine unit is a type of steam engine where steam is expanded in two or more stages. A typical arrangement for a compound engine is that the steam is first expanded in a high-pressure (HP) cylinder, then having given up heat and losing pressure, it exhausts directly into one or more larger-volume low-pressure (LP) cylinders. Multiple-expansion engines employ additional cylinders, of progressively lower pressure, to extract further energy from the steam.
A jackshaft is an intermediate shaft used to transfer power from a powered shaft such as the output shaft of an engine or motor to driven shafts such as the drive axles of a locomotive. As applied to railroad locomotives in the 19th and 20th centuries, jackshafts were typically in line with the drive axles of locomotives and connected to them by side rods. In general, each drive axle on a locomotive is free to move about one inch (2.5 cm) vertically relative to the frame, with the locomotive weight carried on springs. This means that if the engine, motor or transmission is rigidly attached to the locomotive frame, it cannot be rigidly connected to the axle. This problem can be solved by mounting the jackshaft on unsprung bearings and using side-rods or chain drives.
A portable engine is an engine, either a steam engine or an internal combustion engine, that sits in one place while operating, but is portable and thus can be easily moved from one work site to another. Mounted on wheels or skids, it is either towed to the work site or moves there via self-propulsion.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to automobiles:
A steam diesel hybrid locomotive is a railway locomotive with a piston engine which could run on either steam from a boiler or diesel fuel. Examples were built in the United Kingdom, Soviet Union and Italy but the relatively high cost of fuel oil, or failure to resolve problems caused by technical complexity, meant that the designs were not pursued.
The history of steam road vehicles comprises the development of vehicles powered by a steam engine for use on land and independent of rails, whether for conventional road use, such as the steam car and steam waggon, or for agricultural or heavy haulage work, such as the traction engine.
London and North Western Railway (LNWR) 2-2-2 No. 3020 Cornwall is a preserved steam locomotive. She was built as a 4-2-2 at Crewe Works in 1847, but was extensively rebuilt and converted into her current form in 1858.
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A steam motor is a form of steam engine used for light locomotives and light self-propelled motor cars used on railways. The origins of steam motor cars for railways go back to at least the 1850s, if not earlier, as experimental economizations for railways or railroads with marginal budgets. These first examples, at least in North America, appear to have been fitted with light reciprocating engines, and either direct or geared drives, or geared-endless chain drives. Most incorporated a passenger carrying coach attached to the engine and its boiler. Boiler types varied in these earlier examples, with vertical boilers dominant in the first decade and then with very small diameter horizontal boilers. Other examples of steam motor cars incorporated an express-baggage or luggage type car body, with coupling apparatus provided to allow the steam motor car to draw a light passenger coach.
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William Felton was a London coachmaker from 36 Leather Lane in Holborn, and 254 Oxford Street near Grosvenor Square, and noted for his 1796 illustrated two-volume "A Treatise on Carriages; comprehending Coaches, Chariots, Phaetons, Curricles, Gigs, Whiskies, &c Together with their Proper Harness in which the Fair Prices of Every Article are Accurately Stated." William Felton wrote in the book's introduction that he had no literary pretensions, but rather that his aim was to produce an authoritative guide to the construction, maintenance and repair of horse-drawn coaches. The Monthly Review agreed that it was not a literary masterpiece, but praised it for its encyclopaedic treatment of the subject. The Sporting Magazine in its sixth issue was equally complimentary about Felton's Treatise.
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