Steam passenger cars

Steam was the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. It powered factories, steamships on rivers and oceans, railways across continents, and, in the first half of the 19th century, the heavy and somewhat cumbersome omnibuses in England.

Steam-powered passenger cars – horseless carriages – had their glory years at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first twenty years of the twentieth, before they were definitively overtaken by competition from vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Nevertheless, their history is rich, full of interesting technology, successes and failures, and associated with a number of enthusiastic designers who believed in steam propulsion for cars and often sacrificed all their time and money for it. And as you will read in the book, some of them were very successful even in the face of the emerging competition from internal combustion engines.