The Steam Buses

 

 

 

As France fell into the grips of revolution, Cugnot's work was largely forgotten, and the next big innovations in automobile technology came in Britain. Over the next several decades, various inventors worked on steam carriages, which resembled a cross between buses and rail locomotives. William Murdoch created a working model of one of these in 1784, but it wouldn't be until the beginning of the 19th century that Richard Trevithick was able to get a full-sized vehicle on the road.

Steam-powered mass transit had some limited success in the opening years of the 1800s, but it wasn't until the 1820s and 1830s that steam buses began gaining some measure of popularity with the British public. Further technological innovations in this early form of road-based mass transit including better brakes, a more advanced transmission, and improved steering.

The steam buses proved to be something of a dead end, and engineers turned their attention to traction engines, which were slower, more stable machines that were basically just steam locomotives adapted for use on land. This was a move away from the line of innovation that would eventually lead to the car, but even these proved too raucous for the public at large. The Locomotive Act of 1865 said no land vehicle could travel faster than 4 miles per hour, and that all such vehicles had to be preceded by a man waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This was not, as you might imagine, the automotive industry's finest hour.