It was well into the nineteenth century before this idea was wholly abandoned. Edmund Cartwright, inventor of the hand loom, contributed to the experimenting, and the 1831 patent to Sir James C. Anderson was for a very imposing vehicle rowed by twenty-four men. COMPRESSED AIR POWER At the same time that the steam engineers in England were bringing out their vehicles, 1800-35, others were at work on the problem of compressed air carriages. Among these was W. Mann, of Brixton, who, in 1830, published in London a pamphlet, entitled A Description of a New Method of Propelling Locomotive Machines, and of Communicating Power and Motion to All Other Kinds of Machinery, and it contained a lithograph of the proposed carriage. Sir George Medhurst, of England, about 1800, with his proposed regular line of coaches run by compressed air was, perhaps, the most conspicuous experimenter into this method of propulsion. SAILING CARRIAGES ON LAND Many men long speculated upon the possibility of wind propulsion on land as well as upon the sea. The most ambitious attempt in that line was the sailing chariot of Simon Stevin, of The Hague, in 1600. Vehicles of this kind were built by others, and in 1695 Sir Humphrey Mackworth applied sails to wagons on the tramways at his colliery at Neath, South Wales. The Frenchman, Du Quet, in 1714, and the Swiss clergyman, Genevois, proposed to get power from windmills mounted on their wagons. More curious even than these was the carriage drawn by kites, the invention of George Pocock, in 1826. THE STEAM CARRIAGE PREDICTED But all these and other fantastic devices never got beyond the experimental stage, and nothing of a substantial, practical character was ever evolved from them. It remained for the latter part of the eighteenth century to see the subject taken up seriously and considered in a way that promised definite results. And it was steam that then brought the matter strongly to the front. It is true that Sir Isaac Newton tentatively suggested the possibility of carriage propulsion by steam about 1680, but his suggestion lay dormant for nearly a century. Then the growing knowledge of the power of steam and the possibilities in the new element turned men's thoughts again very forcibly to this theme. The stationary engine had shown its usefulness, and the consideration of making this stationary machine movable, and therefore available for transportation, naturally followed. Dr. Erasmus Darwin is said to have urged James Watt and Matthew Boulton to build a fiery chariot as early as 1765. In his poem, The Botanic Garden, famous in that day, Dr. Darwin, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, sang of the future of steam in these lines: