A WHEEL-LESS AND RAIL-LESS AUTO: GERMAN CURIOSITY.
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On the 3rd May, in the village of Pinne, near Posen, and in the presence of a, number of officers of the General Staff of the 5th German Army Corps, as well as of representatives of the Government. and the Presidents of Police, Engineer Wilhelm Goebel, of Breslau, practically demonstrated with a curious vehicle—namely, an automobile moved along, not by wheels, but by six gripper-runners, that alternately rise and fall.
For the purpose of this demonstration a pyramidal construction, consisting of two inclined planes meeting almost in a right angle, had been erected ; and up, over and down this pyramid, over 30 ft. high, Goebel's strange automobile clambered, to the intense astonishment of the spectators, who warmly cheered the inventor at the close of his demonstration.
Herr Goebel himself drove the vehicle, which, we undestand, was fitted with a low-powered Benz engine. Should he succeed in getting a chassis with a transport-body over a similar pyramid the, German War Office purposes taking the matter up, as, in that case, the Goebel invention might prove exceedingly useful for transport work over exceptionally uneven ground—ploughed fields and the like. Hitherto, only a model has been shown in Berlin ; but arrangements
D10 are being made for a practical d.emonstratiou over a far loftier 'pyramid set up expressly in the BerlinGrunewald Stadium.