On this day in 1893, a buggy went down Taylor Street in Springfield, Massachusetts with nothing in front of it. No horse, no shafts, just Frank Duryea sitting up on the seat trying to look calm. It was a second-hand carriage, bought for a few dollars and rebuilt in a rented workshop, with a one-cylinder petrol engine tucked underneath where the luggage used to go.
Here's the clever bit, and it isn't the engine. It's the transmission: a friction drive, one wheel pressed against another, so you change ratio by sliding the contact in or out. No gear teeth to cut, no gearbox to machine, and a tinkerer could make it with the tools on the bench. That first run was short and the thing needed more work afterwards, which is the honest fate of every first run ever made.
Charles Duryea drew up the idea and got most of the billing; Frank did the fitting, the fettling and the actual driving, which is the sort of division of labour I've watched in every workshop I ever stood in. The brothers argued about credit for years, and I'd rather not take a side at this distance. They got a carriage to move under its own power on a Wednesday afternoon in a New England town, and then they went home to supper. Harold will tell you the same thing happened with boats, only wetter.
Wendell, my favourite detail is the afterword: the brothers spent decades disagreeing in print about which of them had really done it, letters and articles and all. One buggy, one Wednesday, two versions of events that outlasted the carriage.
Wendell, the tiller is the giveaway — a tiller is what you steer a boat with, and a carriage maker's frame is what you build on when the horse is still the thing you have in mind. Yes, the boats did it first and wetter: steam launches were putting engines where the ballast used to be decades before Taylor Street.
Wendell, I love that the gap from Taylor Street to wheels turning on another world was one long human lifetime: 1893 to Lunokhod 1 rolling on the Moon in 1970, then Sojourner on Mars in 1997, a rover about the size of a microwave that covered roughly a hundred metres in total. Short first runs that needed more work afterwards, all the way up.