The crowd roared with laughter and derision at the cloud of steam that grew from the middle of the Stanstead Fairgrounds. Rather, to be specific, they chided the machine at the center of the cloud, a malfunctioning horseless carriage that local watchmaker Henry Seth Taylor had promised them would revolutionize the way they traveled. Nearly 150 years later, however, crowds at the Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance will likely be a little less critical of what would become known as Canada’s first automobile.
By the mid-1860s, plenty of steam-powered horseless carriages had emerged from workshops across Europe and the United States. Canada, however, didn’t get its first recorded glimpse of one until 1864, when an unidentified steam carriage – likely one built by Sylvester Hayward Roper of Massachusetts and exhibited by carnival man W.W. Austen – made a tour of country fairs across New England and eastern Canada.
Then 33 years old, Taylor – an inveterate tinkerer, jeweler, saloon owner, photographer, investor and inventor who lived in the border town of Stanstead, Quebec – became enamored with the steam carriage and a year later set about building his own. He recruited a local blacksmith, Joseph Mosher, to forge some metal parts, but did much of the work himself, according to Sharon Babaian, curator of land and marine transportation for the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Stanstead Ottawa, Ontario. That work included not only designing and fabricating the two 3-1/2-inch by 10-inch brass cylinders attached to the frame, but also the entire steam works, 60-pound coal-fired boiler, and an intricate tiller steering system. All said and done, the steam carriage weighed in at about 500 pounds; Taylor boasted that his invention could keep up with any trotting horse around.
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Taylor’s September 1867 debut of the steam carriage at the fair didn’t go all that well. A separated hose caused the steam cloud and subsequently caused Taylor to have to push the automobile off the fairgrounds. Babaian said that Taylor’s grandson described the inventor as a man who tinkered for the fun of it. “He seemed uninterested in patenting his inventions, and there was no sense that he wanted to commercialize the automobile,” she said. “He liked to to see what he could do. He liked refining and improving it.” So he fixed it and brought it out to the fair the following year for a flawless performance.
He demonstrated the steam buggy at various other county fairs that summer as well, but Taylor didn’t get to spend much time with it. Sometime in 1868, while driving down a hill in the village of Stanstead, the carriage – to which Taylor had neglected to add brakes – picked up too much speed and wrecked. As Charles A. Friedric described the incident in Automobile Quarterly volume 4, number 4:
muddy ruts in unpaved roads had seemed sufficient stopping power. But on that morning the road was dry, and Taylor found himself speeding down the slope wih a boiler full of scalding water directly behind him. The vehicle’s steering apparatus – to turn to the right, twist tiller to the left – was not particularly appropriate for moments of emergency. Nor was Mr. Taylor; he pulled the steering arm the wrong way, then instinctively jumped from the car. Seconds later, the buggy landed on its side at the bottom of the hill.
The accident – Canada’s first automobile accident, by the way – damaged the buggy’s wheels, so the next day Taylor gathered up the remains and carted them back to his barn, where he hoisted them to the loft. He picked a few pieces off it here and there and repurposed the boiler for a steam launch he invented about a year later (which ended up sinking to the bottom of Lake Memphremagog after the boiler – burning wood this time – sent out sparks and ashes that set the wooden launch aflame, causing Taylor to abandon ship and swim ashore), but the wreck in the loft remained untouched for as long as the Taylor family owned the property.
Then in 1960, an antique collector named Gertrude Sowden bought the property, recognized at least that the vehicle in the barn’s loft shouldn’t be scrapped, and eventually sold it to Richard Stewart, an American collector who restored what remained of the steam carriage, had a new boiler and wheels made for it, and most importantly, fitted brakes to it. He initially loaned it out to the Ontario Science Center, then in the early 1980s sold it to the Canada Science and Technology Museum, which normally has it on display as part of the museum’s “In Search of the Canadian Car” exhibit. “Everybody agreed that it was an important vehicle, and that it was important that it come home to Canada,” Babaian said.
The Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance just happens to coincide with the museum’s annual weeklong shutdown for cleaning and maintenance, so Babaian said that makes it much easier to get the steam carriage out to show. She said that museum staff will not be firing it up for the concours, however.
This year’s Cobble Beach Concours will take place September 13-14 at the Cobble Beach Golf Resort Community in Toronto near Owen Sound. For more information, visit CobbleBeachConcours.com
Among other _efforts, in 1815, a professor at Prague Polytechnich, Josef Bozek, built an oil-fired steam car. Walter Hancock, builder and operator of London steam buses, in 1838 built a four-seat steam phaeton.
What some people define as the first "real" automobile was produced by Amédée Bollée in 1873, who built self-propelled steam road vehicles to transport groups of passengers.
Karl Benz, the inventor of numerous car-related technologies, received a German patent in 1886.
The four-stroke petrol (gasoline) internal combustion engine that constitutes the most prevalent form of modern automotive propulsion is a creation of Nikolaus Otto. The similar four-stroke diesel engine was invented by Rudolf Diesel. The hydrogen fuel cell, one of the technologies hailed as a
replacement for gasoline as an energy source for cars, was discovered in principle by Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1838. The battery electric car owes its beginnings to Ányos Jedlik, one of the inventors of the electric motor, and Gaston Planté, who invented the lead-acid battery in 1859.
The first carriage sized automobile suitable for use on existing wagon roads in the United States was a steam powered vehicle invented in 1871, by Dr. J.W. Carhart, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Racine, Wisconsin. It induced the State of Wisconsin in 1875, to offer a $10,000 award to the first to produce a practical substitute for the use of horses and other animals. They stipulated that the vehicle would have to maintain an average speed of more than five miles per hour over a 200 mile course. The offer led to the first city to city automobile race in the United States, starting on July 16, 1878, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and ending in Madison, via Appleton, Oshkosh, Waupun, Watertown, Fort Atkinson, and Janesville. While seven vehicles were registered, only two started to compete
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Steam-powered automobiles continued development all the way into the early 20th century, but the dissemination of petrol engines as the motive power of choice in the late 19th century marked the end of steam automobiles except as curiosities.
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