Just as a painter paints, a writer
writes and a cook cooks, a tinkerer
tinkers – compulsively. That is why,
before they were known as such,
the first carmakers were restless
fiddlers.
A rare reminder of this is at the 2015
Toronto motor show, in the form of
19th-Century watchmaker Henry Seth
Taylor’s steam carriage – the first
known car built in Canada. Able to
travel at a sustained 24kph (15mph) in
its day, the coal-fired steamer, built in
1867, harks back to an era when
mechanical polymaths did not wait for
the future to arrive; they built it.
Coming nearly 20 years before Karl
Benz patented his internal-combustion-
powered automobile, Taylor’s buggy
was actually modelled on a US-built
steam car that the Quebec native
spotted in 1864. Like his inspiration,
Taylor specified a coal-fired boiler for
the carriage. When pressurised, the
resulting steam helped move a piston
attached to the rear axle, producing
forward motion. There was no reverse
gear, nor were there brakes.
“Get a horse” was a phrase that would
hound drivers for another half-century
after Taylor’s feat, but such men did
not build cars to rival Mustangs, but to
reflect their own restive vanity.
“Taylor was already established when
he set out to build this,” says Sharon
Babaian, transportation curator at the
Canada Science and Technology
Museum in Ottawa. “It appears he’d
also previously built an Edison-style
gramophone. Men like him couldn’t sit
still.” The museum has held the
steamer since 1983, having purchased
it from US collector Richard Stewart. It
was under Stewart’s care that the car
was restored, using a combination of
archival photography and blind
intuition. “The car had been
disassembled in a barn, and of course
the wood from the carriage body and
wheels had rotted away, so there was
much work to do,” Babaian says.
Indeed, the car at the Toronto motor
show is as much jigsaw puzzle as
motoring artefact. Some original
elements, however, aged remarkably
well. “The brass-work around the
cylinders, the oil caps, they’re all in
fantastic condition,” Babaian says. The
same could not be said for the boiler,
which has been replaced twice since
the car’s discovery in the 1950s. No
salutatory spins of the north country
any time soon; the retrofitted boiler, as
Babaian points out, lacks a coal box.
“But there’s a storage nook for lump
coal or wood right under the driver’s
perch there,” she says.
Canada motoring history, in the hot
seat.
writes and a cook cooks, a tinkerer
tinkers – compulsively. That is why,
before they were known as such,
the first carmakers were restless
fiddlers.
A rare reminder of this is at the 2015
Toronto motor show, in the form of
19th-Century watchmaker Henry Seth
Taylor’s steam carriage – the first
known car built in Canada. Able to
travel at a sustained 24kph (15mph) in
its day, the coal-fired steamer, built in
1867, harks back to an era when
mechanical polymaths did not wait for
the future to arrive; they built it.
Coming nearly 20 years before Karl
Benz patented his internal-combustion-
powered automobile, Taylor’s buggy
was actually modelled on a US-built
steam car that the Quebec native
spotted in 1864. Like his inspiration,
Taylor specified a coal-fired boiler for
the carriage. When pressurised, the
resulting steam helped move a piston
attached to the rear axle, producing
forward motion. There was no reverse
gear, nor were there brakes.
“Get a horse” was a phrase that would
hound drivers for another half-century
after Taylor’s feat, but such men did
not build cars to rival Mustangs, but to
reflect their own restive vanity.
“Taylor was already established when
he set out to build this,” says Sharon
Babaian, transportation curator at the
Canada Science and Technology
Museum in Ottawa. “It appears he’d
also previously built an Edison-style
gramophone. Men like him couldn’t sit
still.” The museum has held the
steamer since 1983, having purchased
it from US collector Richard Stewart. It
was under Stewart’s care that the car
was restored, using a combination of
archival photography and blind
intuition. “The car had been
disassembled in a barn, and of course
the wood from the carriage body and
wheels had rotted away, so there was
much work to do,” Babaian says.
Indeed, the car at the Toronto motor
show is as much jigsaw puzzle as
motoring artefact. Some original
elements, however, aged remarkably
well. “The brass-work around the
cylinders, the oil caps, they’re all in
fantastic condition,” Babaian says. The
same could not be said for the boiler,
which has been replaced twice since
the car’s discovery in the 1950s. No
salutatory spins of the north country
any time soon; the retrofitted boiler, as
Babaian points out, lacks a coal box.
“But there’s a storage nook for lump
coal or wood right under the driver’s
perch there,” she says.
Canada motoring history, in the hot
seat.
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