We thought the development of the motor car was speedy, but we find that the measure of time required for its evolution, when put beside the span of human history, lengthens as the shadows grow longer in the dying day. It is astonishing what stages this development has had to pass through, what problems have confronted it, and what apparently insuperable obstacles it has had to overcome. In the light which our knowledge of the automobile now sheds on the present day mechanism of this invention, it is difficult for us to realize why these persistent struggles toward development of the mechanical ideas summoned to the aid of the inventors did not produce speedier results. We can hardly conceive as we look upon the perfect limousine, skimming over the smooth asphalt with a motion that contains no more vibration than that in the glide of the expert ice skater, the crudeness, cumbersomeness and racking joltiness of its first forbear, which was the original expression of the mechanical idea involved in making wheels revolve by a motive power other than that exercised by man, the bullock or the horse. If we want to relieve our minds of the strain of comprehending the difference between the automobile de luxe, as we of today know it, and the first automobile ever produced, and, by putting the two pictures side by side, span the period of the development of the art of automobile making, we must journey to Paris. For, although internal combustion to drive a piston in a cylinder was produced with gun-powder in 1678 by Abbe D’Hautefeuille, and a carriage to be driven without the horse was a chaise propelled by human foot work, first conceived by John Vevers of England in 1769, there is no record that the two ideas were combined until it was done in France somewhere between 1760 and 1770. The first automobile ever made was that produced by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, a Frenchman, and it is today on exhibition in the Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris. There is no record of how Cugnot came to conceive the idea of his invention, but it is surmised that he had read about James Watt, in England, having discovered the principle of steam as motive power. This was about 1755. The history of Watt’s experiments in applying steam to run engines does not, however, disclose that any engines he produced were ever seen by Cugnot, or that any adequate description of them was published at the time when Cugnot could have taken advantage of it. So all we may actually know of Cugnot’s reasons for thinking he could make an “animalless” road vehicle is locked up in the rickety century-and-a-half-old Cugnot invention which we may see in the Paris Conservatory. And what we would see would be: