Steam-Cars

Think of Steam-Cars & one word immediately springs to mind .....

GENEVIEVE

But how and when did the Steam-Car originate?

In 1672, Ferdinand Verbiest - a Flemish Jesuit priest working in a mission in China, demonstrated a small working steam model that was the precursor to the steam powered cars that were to follow two hundred years later. In 1771, two years after his five ton tricycle had crashed through a Parisian wall Nicolas Joseph Cugnot built the Fardier steam vehicle. This three wheeler attained an astounding speed of 2/3 mph! It was made for the then French Minister of War and never went into production.

In 1854, Virgilio Bordino took the body of the then hugely popular horse drawn Landau carriage and converted it into a steam car. It went almost exactly at half the speed as the horses that had previously pulled it along.

Steam cars would need to be easier to drive and much faster to capture the imagination of the public and it took identical twins to achieve that.The Stanley Brothers in America, gave up a thriving photographic plate company and put all of their energies into building the "Stanley Steamer", a car that for some strange reason they did not want to advertise. The business was a great success and led to the brothers selling it to Locomobile in 1899.This didn't stop them designing cars however and in 1906 they took their weird looking steam car to Ormand Beach, now the famous Daytona Beach, to take part in the Land Speed Record attempt alongside four petrol powered cars.



Their driver, Fred Marriot attained a measured mile time of 28 1/5 second that equated to a winning land speed record of 127.65 mph, beating the previous record of 109 mph held by Darracq.They attempted this again the following year, but the sands were in bad condition and Marriot was seriously injured after hitting a depression and becoming airborne. Fearing they would lose their valuable driver, it ended the Stanley Brothers record breaking attempts for good. The speed showing on the speedometer was 197 mph.The Stanley Steam Car passenger models sold well until 1925 when they were discontinued.


Images by kind permission of the Steam Car Club of Great Britain

Other steam car names included... Gardner-Serpollet, EWK, Mobile, Locomobile, Salverson, White, Steamobile, G.N, Puritan, Toledo, Hoyt, Whitney, Dudgeon,Millwaukee, Skene, Foster, Hupmobile, Waltham, Hart, Turner-Miesse, reading, De Dion Bouto & Trepardoux, Brooks Steam Motors, Trask-Detroit, Paxton-Phoenix, Thomson & Bollee.





Inevitably, with the introduction of the internal combustion engine, one had to lose out;Steam was fast, simple and there was not much to go wrong, unfortunately, it's big drawback was that it took at least half an hour to get steam up for the journey and it needed lots of water. As there was a distinct lack of places to water up, this presented a big problem and although by 1923 Doble had perfected an auto boiler & burner that enabled starting in under forty seconds, it was all too little too late for the Steam-Car. High production costs meant that they were only available to the wealthy and with the development of the electric starter and Henry Ford's assembly line, mass production of the Model T meant much lower costs and availability to all.

The story of the Steam-Car doesn't end there however. Modern versions are continually being tried and tested especially now that car producers are continually searching for the "green alternative".

Saab steam car

As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, SAAB started a project in 1974 headed by Dr. Ove Platell which made a prototype steam-powered car. It used an electronically-controlled 28 pound multi-parallel-circuit steam generator with 1 millimetre bore tubing and 16 gph firing rate which was intended to produce 160 horsepower (119 kW), and was about the same size as a standard car battery. Lengthy start-up times were circumvented by a system using compressed air that was stored when the car was running and which powered the car upon starting until adequate steam pressure was built up. The engine used a conical rotary valve made from pure boron nitride. To conserve water, a hermetically sealed water system was used.

Enginion Steamcell

From 1996, a R&D subsidiary of the Volkswagen group called Enginion AG was developing a system called ZEE (Zero Emissions Engine). It produced steam almost instantly without an open flame, and took 30 seconds to reach maximum power from a cold start. Their third prototype, EZEE03, was a three-cylinder unit meant to fit in a Skoda Fabia automobile. The EZEE03 was described as having a "two-stroke" (i.e. single-acting) engine of 1000 cc (164 cubic inches) displacement, producing up to 220 hp (500 N m / 369 ft·lbf)[12]. Exhaust emissions were said to be far below the SULEV standard. It had an "oilless" engine with ceramic cylinder linings using steam instead of oil as a lubricant. However, Enginion found that the market was not ready for steam cars, so they opted instead to develop the "Steamcell" power generator/heating system based on similar technology.

An interesting project that is currently underway is the
British Steam-Car Challenge that aims to beat the current land speed record using eco friendly innovative technology.

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