I built a steam car that ran. It had a kerosene-heated boiler and it
developed plenty of power and a neat control--which is so easy with a
steam throttle. But the boiler was dangerous. To get the requisite power
without too big and heavy a power plant required that the engine work
under high pressure; sitting on a high-pressure steam boiler is not
altogether pleasant. To make it even reasonably safe required an excess
of weight that nullified the economy of the high pressure. For two years
I kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers--the engine and
control problems were simple enough--and then I definitely abandoned the
whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam. I knew that in England
they had what amounted to locomotives running on the roads hauling lines
of trailers and also there was no difficulty in designing a big steam
tractor for use on a large farm. But ours were not then English roads;
they would have stalled or racked to pieces the strongest and heaviest
road tractor. And anyway the manufacturing of a big tractor which only a
few wealthy farmers could buy did not seem to me worth while.

But I did not give up the idea of a horseless carriage. The work with
the Westinghouse representative only served to confirm the opinion I had
formed that steam was not suitable for light vehicles. That is why I
stayed only a year with that company. There was nothing more that the
big steam tractors and engines could teach me and I did not want to
waste time on something that would lead nowhere. A few years before--it
was while I was an apprentice--I read in the _World of Science_, an
English publication, of the "silent gas engine" which was then coming
out in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating
gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus
intermittent required an extremely heavy fly-wheel. As far as weight was
concerned it gave nothing like the power per pound of metal that a steam
engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to dismiss it as