So we see that as there was a first automobile, so was there a first automobile enthusiast on automobile speed. Why it is that motordom hasn’t erected a monument to Oliver Evans for his abiding faith in the future of the motor car as a speed demon, is up to motordom to explain. AUTOMOBILE APATHY CENTURY OLD. Oliver Evans tried but was unable to get any one interested in developing his wagon run by an engine into an improved horseless carriage. The minds of that day regarded the practicability of his invention with as much skepticism as we would regard an invention to visit Mars, if exhibited in our day. So Evans gave up any idea of improving his self-running wagon, became busy with an iron foundry which people could understand, and died rich. There was a measure of justification for the lack of popular imagination and vision toward the automobile in both England and America when the first samples appeared. They were slow, noisy, erratic in performance, and positively dangerous—threatening explosions, collisions, and all sorts of dire things—and it was natural that people should predict their failure. So progress in the development of the horseless carriage lagged. It was twenty years after Evans’ Philadelphia exhibition when it was next heard from. Then the scene of operations shifted again to England. In 1824, W. H. James, who had patented a water tube boiler for locomotives, built a passenger coach, of which each drive wheel was revolved by two cylinders receiving steam by means of a pipe from a boiler. A pressure of 200 pounds of steam to the inch was maintained. The equivalent of differential action was supplied by independent application of power to the two drive wheels. The coach accommodated twenty persons. The contrivance ran satisfactorily on trials, and James secured financial backing and built another coach weighing 6,000 pounds which ran 12 to 15 miles an hour. But the higher the rate of speed, the worse off the early automobile builder was. Although James equipped his coach with laminated steel springs, the road shocks and vibration stopped it every few miles. Steam joints and connections were broken as fast as they could be put together. The great need was a method of shock absorption, and either no one knew that this was the key to the problem, or, if it was realized, no one knew the remedy. So James failed to make the auto-coach a success, and died in the poorhouse. A year after James built his first motor-coach in England—in 1825—Thomas Blanchard of Springfield, Mass., revived the horseless carriage subject which, in America, had been last experimented with by Oliver Evans in 1804. Blanchard built a road vehicle that was one of the best produced up to that time. It was easy of manipulation and climbed hills successfully. Blanchard took out a patent on it, but when he started to find people who would buy a completed carriage he could discover none. Nobody wanted it. And so Blanchard’s efforts ceased.