LEAVES FROM THE INSPECTOR'S NOTEBOOK.
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Our Contemptible Familiarity with Millions. The Inventor of the Tank.
WE ARE NOW going to live in a riot of reconstruction. As I write, the election appears likely to be fought on programmes promising almost boundless energy and certainly boundless expenditure in polishing up this old country of ours. We are going to plough, afforest, reclaim, cultivate, road mend and road make ; we shall reconstruct the railway's, rebuild and wipe out all the slums, build hundreds of thousands of houses, and generally make everything delightful for everybody at everybody's expense. But there is a rather disconcerting factor in all this pan of reconstructive joy, in our sustained mood of desiring to be "up and at it."
We have got used to the fact that we have been living as a nation at a. general charge for war pia-poses of a trifle of six-and-a--half millons a day—a sum which nobody understood and very few appreciated. Already, there is to be noticed alendency, amongst those who are framing, with a very free hand, programmes for our national betterment, to treat very cavalierly the question of cost. They assume that, as the nation has spent thousands of millions of pomids (an amount of which 1, for one, have not the very vaguest conception), any further sehemes for peace-time development involving the expenditure of a mere million or two hardly need considering on the score of £ s. d. For instance, on the question of the nationalization and standardization of railways, or of the widening, deepening or reconstructing of canals, we already are told that this or that operation of one or the other schemes could easily be carried out for a total expenditure which is not more than what we should have spent had the war gone on for another couple of days. That may be quite true, but it is a very and, perhaps, intentionally misleading way in which to put forward such schemes for public approval. It is, nevertheless, a, plan which is being adopted quite widely by the various exponents of post-war national improvement schemes, and if these enthusiasts for improvement are given their heads .without control, it will not be very long before the nation is cheerily committed to a total expenditure which may, in the aggregate, be no more than.another year or two of what war would have cost.
The whole point is that it is quite wrong for these schemes to be considered in comparison with the utterly wasteful and non-productive expenditure which, on such an amazingly huge scale, has been incurred by the world in arms during the last four years. We have all got used to talking of millions without in the slightest degree underitandaig what we mean, and our 'better judgments, as sensible and sane citizens of this great Empire, may be quite easily nullified if these ingenuous suggestions of negligible expenditure on the grand scale are allowed to pass without criticism as to their actual effect on the nation's finances and their net effect on the nation's welfare. It has to be remembered that all these millions have to be found Somewhere. Whilst all of us, of course, will haa4 our own pet schemes, we of the commercial-vehicle industry, being particularly concerned for the betterment of the roads, will do well to endeavour to analyse them upon a proper basis, and not upon an artificial one based on our contemptible familiarity with millions.
The Inventor of the Tank.
I am not acquainted with the names of all the various people who claim to have invented the Tank. I imagine that our own industry is fully of opinion that the credit is to Sir William Tritton, the energetic and enterprising managing director of William Foster
BaO
and Co.' , of Lincoln. It was that same gentleman who had the Spartan courage to depart from stereotyped traction engine design by giving to his little tractor a form of springing which, while simplicity in itself, and based, as it was, more or less on locomotive practice, was quite a novelty, in so far as its adoption to that very conservative class of construction was concerned.
According to the daily. Press, there appears to be some sort of coroner's inquest sitting on the claims of the various people who "invented the Tank." How many claims there may be, and upon what they base their claims I do not know, but I imagine it 'would be a very illuminating experience if one had the right of entry to the committee room and to hear those various claimants urging their own cases, if that is the procedure that will be adopted. On a small scale, I recall a somewhat similar tussle for the ,palm leaves over the chain-drive gearbox, which device was the first real practical stage in the production of the uaidern silent motorbus which was able to satisfy the very careful critics of Scotland Yard, for instance.
' So far as the Tank itself is concerned, its outstanding feature of design, of course, is its caterpillar form of track, first used with a peculiar form of suspension on the original machines; but in the whippets following very closely on the lines of the Holt and similar "creepers." The idea of an armoured car is, of course, a very much -older one than that of the Tank, and was a. perfectly obvious development from the armoured railway train used many years ago—I believe as far back as the Zulu war and early Sudan campaigns. These, again, were a logical development of design, once the principle of steel armouring had been adopted. As to armour itself, body armour of sorts was, of course, in use in very early days indeed, and by the use of raw, hide and of similar material it appears to have occurred simultaneously-and without collusion—to many a dusky savage in the form of a crude shield to protect him from missiles of
all kinds.
The Tank, therefore, appears to have been a, clever combination of ideas already existent for a particularly military purpose, and in that sense not to be properly compared, for instance, with the Brother 1Vrights' earliest and entirely novel experiments with gliding planes. The chain track has been a favourite subject with inventors for many years past, although its practical application on a decent scale has only been effected during recent years. The Holt Caterpillar people have, I suppose, effected the largest and most important commercial application in the long run. Hornsby's, of Lincoln, built a, chain-track military tractor which was a converted edition of a standard motorcar, which, I believe, was of German make, by the way. The British Army experimented on a strictly economical scale in .this direction a num-ber of years ago.
As the Tank haa undoubtedly had a, large share in tipping the balance of the fortunes of war in our favour—largely by virtue of its scientifically applied weight—it would at least be fitting that we should know to whom proper honour should be done as the original inventor. No branch of industry will take a greater pride in such recogniticm than our own, which, I anticipate, will prove in the long run Tightly to claim the actual inventor amongst its ranks. But we shall see. At any rate, the Tank is not a pleasure car!