An object which might make us laugh, did we not soberly reflect, in the light of our superior knowledge of today, that it was the first step in the long, laborious journey, extending over 157 years, that inventors had to travel to produce our luxurious limousine, our satisfying touring car and our terrifying speed demon of the oval racing course. Cugnot’s body returned to dust 113 years ago, but his idea went marching on. The visible expression of this idea which we can see in the Paris Conservatory is in the form of a tractor for a field gun, Cugnot having been a captain in the engineering corps of the French army. The tractor has a single drive wheel actuated by two single acting brass cylinders, connected by an iron steam pipe with a round boiler of copper containing fire pot and chimneys. Attached to this first motor-driven road vehicle is a wagon, on which it was Cugnot’a idea to have a field gun mounted. On either side of the single drive wheel of this clumsy contrivance are located ratchet wheels. Pistons acting alternately on these ratchet wheels revolved the drive wheel in quarter revolutions. For the copper boiler of this first motor car, additional water was needed after the machine had travelled a few feet, the exhaust of steam quickly leaving the boiler dry. The speed attained was very slow, by reason of the mechanical complications in transmitting power to the drive wheel. As for running smoothly, the machine wobbled, and bumped, and strained, and groaned, and finally ran into a wall. This was because it was overbalanced by its boiler and engine and had no steering gear. Having run into a wall and been partially wrecked, that was the end of the forerunner of the automobile, except for its subsequent rescue from a junk heap and its installation in the Paris Conservatory; for, disheartened by what he regarded as his failure to make a successful steam-driven tractor to relieve men and other animals of the burden of transporting field guns, Cugnot turned his attention to devising a cavalry gun, at which he was so successful that when he died in 1804 he was enjoying a pension of 1,000 livres a year, given him by Napoleon. Cugnot could not, of course, have visioned what his first crude automobile would develop into in the next century and a half. He probably never thought of a car holding seven passengers—much less of a speed for it of 60 miles an hour and more. In truth, since he abandoned his efforts, he probably concluded the obstacles in the way of even a practical fulfillment of his idea were insurmountable. The one fact remains to keep company with the Cugnot motor tractor in the Conservatory of Paris, that Cugnot was the father of the idea out of which the automobile was evolved. He was the first to invent a motor-driven road vehicle. ENGLISH MAKE AUTOMOBILES ALMOST PRACTICABLE.