In most cases travel in the millennium after the Romans was a local activity based around one or two villages or towns. We saw earlier how longer distance travel slowly began to increase, but up to the 18th century such trips were predominantly made by human and animal foot traffic.
Humans on foot could manage between 15 and 40 km a day, depending on need and burden. A number of towns grew around these day’s walk distances. The speed record for long-distance foot-travel was probably held by the Incas who developed a system which was able to transmit messages at 400 km/day by using fast runners over 2.5 km stages, suggesting that the runners were achieving about 15 km/h running stages by day and night.
A single horse and rider could manage about 60 km/day. To extend this meant using horses in stages and thus establishing ‘post houses’ where tired horses could be rested and fresh horses obtained. Horses could make 30 km trips each day but oxen (or bullocks) could only travel half that distance and were more difficult to organise. However, they had the advantage that they could haul larger loads, could keep going over more days, required less water and were easier to feed.
Pack horses (or donkeys or mules) could each carry about 120 kg shared between two pannier baskets for up to 25 km. Long strings of nine or more pack horses, called drifts, worked many regular freight routes. The horses were tied together and the lead animal had bells attached to its saddle. In the 18th century there were special pack horse paths (or causeways or causeys), sometimes stone-paved, with their own bridges and guarded with posts to deter use by carts.
3.5.2 Steam
When Roger Bacon predicted in the 13th century that, inter alia, ‘one day we shall endow chariots with incredible speed without the aid of animals’ he was jailed for being in league with the Devil. For 500 years, the decision must have seemed eminently wise.
The first doubts occurred when Newcomen completed his steam engine in 1712, after years of experimenting. However, its application to transport occurred very slowly. When it happened about a century later, man at last had a source of transport power much greater and easier to manage than the horse and the ox. But the power did not come without a price. The steam engines were heavy and large. Whilst the iron wheel could manage the new loads, few road pavements could carry the iron wheel.
To circumvent this problem inventors first tried bigger wheels. Such solutions were not effective and the inventors soon turned to placing their iron wheels on iron rails, carefully distributing and spreading the high loads via the rails, sleepers and macadam- like ballast. Flanges were placed on the wheels to stop them coming off the rails. The fact that this obviated the need for steering was incidental. Rail rapidly became the dominant land transport mode. Roads became no more than feeder roads to railway stations and even many of these roads were in such bad condition that they had begun affecting railway business.
Steam road-vehicles were far less successful. They suffered from a lack of mechanical reliability, commercial opposition from the stage coaches, railways, and
Handbook of Road Technology
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turnpikes, and a range of only 20 km before a 15 minute rewatering stop. Indeed, they required about 10 L of water per kilometre. Clearly, the time was not yet technologically ripe for self-powered road vehicles.
The steam-powered vehicles were the cause of the notorious U.K. Red Flag Act (properly the Locomotive Act) which restricted the speeds of road locomotive to 7 km/h in the country and 3 km/h in the city. It also required the vehicle to be preceded by a man walking with a red flag by day or a lantern by night. Each vehicle had to have at least three operators. The Act was introduced in 1865 and not significantly relaxed until 1896, an event celebrated by the first of the famous London to Brighton car rallies. No other European country had had anything like the Act and it was a major restraint on British innovation in car technology during that time.
3.5.3 Bicycles
The great impact that the invention of a useable bicycle had in the closing third of the 19th century is often forgotten. Macmillan in Scotland introduced the first lever-powered bicycle in 1839. Despite the potential of these ‘velocipedes’, inventors were drawn away from them by the then-current railway mania. The first commercial bike was built in Paris in 1861 by Michaux, using foot pedals and a front-wheel drive. Attempts to improve the gearing then led to the ‘ordinary’ or penny-farthing bicycle. The ‘safety’ bicycle with pedal chain drive to the rear axle was introduced in 1877 and the first recognisable modern bicycle appeared in 1885.
The bicycle became popular and widespread through another great forgotten invention that changed the face of our transport world. This was the Scottish veterinarian Dr John Dunlop’s invention in Northern Ireland in 1888 of the pneumatic tyre, an invention made specifically for the bicycle. The pneumatic tyre made the bicycle a useable and useful tool. Its key long term-effects were that:
* it overcame the millennia-old narrow wheel/high contact pressure problem, and
* it allowed high loads to be applied to wheels in the knowledge that the tyre would spread the load out over an area such that the contact pressure would, approximately, never exceed the tyre inflation pressure.
It is strange now to learn of the alarm with which many greeted the bicycle. It was pointedly noted that the cyclist, although using the road, ‘was usually not even a ratepayer’. Cyclists were damned as ‘cads on castors’ and were said to have scared horses and pedestrians, raised dust, scattered mud, and travelled at excessive speeds of up to 20 km/h. An 1888 British regulation required all cyclists to carry a bell which would tinkle continuously whilst the cycle was in motion.
Whereas steam was providing the world — or at least the prosperous world — with long-distance travel, the bicycle was offering efficient and effective short-distance travel to all, in a way that the horse and the steam train never could. The bicycle initiated humanity to that 20th century right — the freedom of every citizen to travel when and where he wishes.
Thus it is not surprising that the bicycle clubs produced the first useful road maps, were the first group tourists, were the founders of many of today’s automobile clubs and were the first organised protagonists for better roads via the Good Roads Association which arose in most developed countries.
History of Roads 27 3.5.4 Cars
Gottfried Daimler and Karl Benz in Germany developed the first useable petrol-powered internal combustion (IC) engines between 1882 and 1885. A key advantage of the new IC engines was that they easily utilised petroleum distillates, liquid energy that was readily dispensed, transported and consumed and which had a very high energy to volume ratio. Although they never met, the firms established by the two men finally merged in 1926. Benz’s first successful vehicle (1885–86) was a tricycle powered by a one-cylinder gas motor that Daimler followed three months later with a powered bicycle.
The first practical trucks were steam powered and were in use on the roads from their introduction in France in 1892 until about 1930, although Britain, with an abundance of coal, did not stop building steam trucks until 1950. However, trucks powered by IC engines arrived in 1894 and had captured the market by 1900. The end of the horse era was surely the 1911 announcement by the British War Office that the motor truck was to replace the horse on a large scale in the British Army.
By the end of the 19th century there had thus been a congruence of events seemingly stage-managed to produce the modern motor vehicle. The new universal desire for private travel was supplied per medium of the pneumatic tyre and the IC engine. No flanged wheels restricted the driver’s choice of route. The one missing factor was a good road system. Indeed, the roads of the day were such that it was wise to use large-diameter, wooden-spoked wheels to provide sufficient clearance over rocks, stumps, and other obstacles.
Although the pneumatic tyre brought the advantage of applying lower vertical contact pressures and better stress distributions to the road surface, it also delivered other bounties. In particular, the enhanced surface-friction — coupled with the greater power now available — allowed markedly greater acceleration and deceleration performance. These speed changes applied much greater horizontal loads to the pavement surfaces than had previously been encountered. Worse was to come — as braking capabilities increased, so did travel speeds, and high-speed cornering on curves produced yet another set of new forces. In addition the tyres of the speeding vehicles began to create significant uplift suctions on the pavement surfaces, leading to clouds of dust. Thus the new vehicles with their speeding, braking, accelerating, skidding and cornering began to seriously abrade the old road surfaces. The most obviously annoying characteristics of the car at the turn of the century were that it was dangerous and caused dust. The second loomed larger in the eyes of the public, the dust covering everything within 20 m of the roadways.
The enthusiastic adoption of the car meant that the expanding push for good roads that the cyclists had begun gained even more momentum as those roads that did exist began to deteriorate under the new traffic. The legacy of sixty or so years of inattention had left no effective infrastructure for the dazzling new invention.