Society of Motor Omnibus Engineers.
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Discussion on Mr. Douglas Mackenzie's Paper.
LORD MONTAGU, Honorary President, some of whose opening remarks were _reported by us last week, also said: The whole question of motor traction is one which has been in my mind for many years past. As regards this particular class of traction, I think everybody who has thought seriously about the subject realises that it is going to be almost the most important branch of automobilism. Perhaps I am one of those who see a good deal of the public side upon this question, and I am sure you will agree that this question we are discussing is a matter which interests me personally, and, indeed, this question of the heavy traffic interests me quite as much as the lighter traffic .14 motorcars. Upon this question I know that you engineers are always
WORKING OUT NEW PROBLEMS.
Hitherto the problems which have had to be solved have been problems which we have had to face for centuries past. Those who have had horse traffic to deal with, or railway traction problems to face, will readily realise that with mechanical road traction you have different circumstances, which involve new problems, and these it is the aim of this society to try to salve. We see a great deal of very inaccurate and unfair comment in the newspapers, and we are often, I am afraid, treated to accounts of accidents which would NOT BE CALLED ACCIDENTS
at all if they were caused by horse-drawn vehicles. No one can help seeing that the greatest part of this problem is the problem of the men. To get a good motorman, either for a pleasure motorcar or for a heavy public-service vehicle, is very diffieult indeed, and no one will contradict me when I say that the demand at the present time for men capable of conducting these vehicles efficiently is so great that those who have to employ many of these drivers are obliged to accept employees in whose skill they have way little confidence. I do not mean confidence as regards risk of accidents, but skill in handling a piece of delicate machinery. Misuse of delicate machinery like this means an increase in the cost of working. It does not matter whether it is a steamship or a motorhus, if you do not have skilled management at a reasonable figure, the working must necessarily he prohobitive in the first instance.
Amongst the disadvantages which motor vehicles have to contend with is the tendency they have to skid, and this is a point which is going to be touched upon by the reader of the paper. Skidding is not something which is confined to heavy vehicles, because I have seen four-wheelers skid, and also ordinaryomnibuses, and there is one place in London where you can see skidding take place at any time when the roads are a little greasy—I mean at a spot at the end of Bond Street, where the slope of the road is very great towards the pavement. That will surprise anybody who is not a student of these matters. If a horse-drawn vehicle skids, you cannot be at all surprised when you hear that a vehicle propelled from the hinder part skids much worse. We have to tackle this problem very seriously, and I think it is the greatest problem we have to solve. Skidding is something which frightens the passengers, and we most recognise that it is a very serious matter. I think we may take it that we shall not be allowed to go on
KNOCKING DOWN LAMP-POSTS
and knocking over apple women with the same freedom and ease with which we have been allowed to do so up to the present.
I do not know whether you have considered to what causes skidding is due, As a pretty old motorist myself, I can say it largely results in London from three principal causes. In the first place, it is due to the excessive camber of the roads. which makes the vehicles tend to slide from the crown of the reads towards the gutter; in the second place, T should mention bad driving, because drivers frequently pull up their vehicles tan quickly, and put the brake on too hard, and, consequently, the brakes do not act with equal force on each wheel; in the third place, I should say skidding is often due to the faulty construction of vehicles in which the weights are not properly disposed, and in which sufficient allowance is not made for the fact that, whenever you have anything of the nature of rubber running on the streets of London, there is always a thin laver of mud to be reckoned with, and that, without some non-skid prevention, it is impo.i3ible that such vehicles should not skid on certain occasions. A great many inventors call upon me and declare that they have a sovereign remedy for skidding, but it all really bode down to this, that we must find something either in the hinder wheels which grips the ground, or we must have a fifth wheel which can be let down on occasions to prevent skidding when the moment arrives when it is required, and where the streets are so greasy as to need it. Whether some device of that kind can be put on motor omnibuses I am not prepared to say, but it is a Very serious question, and from what I hear from Government sources, it is
THE CHIEF FEAR
in the minds of those who in high administrative circles have to deal. with this question. The great fear is that an unlimited amount of skidding will produce a great feeling of dissatisfaction amongst the public in regard to this new kind of traction. The evidence of any very great public dissatisfaction is not so apparent when you consider the enormous number of people who are carried every day as passengers on motor omnibuses in London, and, if the public had been really scared, as some of the papers would have you suppose, most of the seats on motorbuses would be empty, instead of 05 per rent, of them being filled. The Government say "make your vehicles safe in order that you will out knock down any more lamp-posts, and then we will allow you to proceed."
I have not the slightest doubt that the problems of to-day are perfectly soluble. With that care and diligent attention which we are all giving to them, I feel certain that the mechanically-propelled public service vehicle will eventually supersede all forms of rail traction in the streets. It might be interesting to quote a remark made to a great friend of mine no less than two years ago by Mr. Edison, who said that he thought ELECTRIC TRAMS WERE A THING Ol."BHE PAST,
and mechanically-propelled vehicles, to move about the road,. were the vehicles of the future. We have all been waiting for Mr. Edison's battery-, but it has not yet arrived. It is, however, admitted that Mr. Edison is a man of great power and foresight, and I should not be surprised if his words came true sooner than we are expecting. I notice that the reader of the paper is going to say something about who is going to control the traffic of I,ondon, and who should license the vehicles plying for hire. Upon this point I do not think we can do better than adopt the recommendations of the Royal Commission, and establish a Traffic Board, for London, not composed of the members of the London County Council, or controlled by them, because they are the owners of a rival kind of traction, but it should be a board composed of gentlemen as impartial as could be got together, and they should have under their control the vast traffic of London, and be able to adjudicate on rival schemes. It seems to me to be eminently unsuitable that the County Council should have anything to do with that Board. It is a curious fact, that whereas the greatest amount of attention is given to the road affairs of most of the counties in England, no attention, or, at any rate, no co-ordinated attention, is given to the road affairs of the greatest city in the world, and the one which has the greatest amount of traffic. That is an anomaly that ought not to exist much longer, and I hope the Government will throw off their terror of the London County Council, and appoint an impartial body of that kind, not only to prevent any further waste of public money in underground tubes, which, in my opinion, are doomed, but also, at the same time, to produce a reasonable licensing body which will not find too much fault, and which will have some scientific knowledge of the vehicles which they are proposing to license.
[The text of Mr. Douglas Mackenzie's paper, which was read at this point of the proceedings, will be found on pages let& to 170 of our issue of last week.]
At the conclusion of the paper, Mr. SHEAPNELL SMITH, VicePresident, in moving a vote of thanks to Mr. Mackenzie for his admirable paper, said that Mr. Mackenzie had had the advantage of a consulting experience both in London and in the country, and he was able to deal with many points which demanded their attention, and no doubt their reflection hereafter. He congratulated Mr. Mackenzie upon the facile manner in which he got through a long paper, and upon the excellent manner in which he had delivered it. In reference to the question of tires,.
the reader of the paper had stated that no particular form of rubber tire would have any influence in regard to side-slipping, but they all knew that the twin tire, in regard to this matter of side-slipping, was an advance on the single-tread tire. He (Mr. Smith) had always been a believer in the block tire, which he thought would be an advance even on the twin tire. He agreed that no rubber tire, on account of the limiting angle of friction between that substance and wood or asphalt, would ever entirely eliminate side-slipping. In reference to the question of " stop " notices, he thought the police had been guilty of going from one extreme to the other. A great improvement • had taken place with regard to motor omnibuses, and, as one who frequently had to travel in or upon these omnibuses through the streets of London, he could bear testimony to the fact that, eight or nine months ago, the noises from motor omnibuses were so APPALLING AND ANNOYING that he was obliged to confess that such a state of things could not go on. There seemed to have been in the past a mistaken idea on the amount of police indulgence the public would tolerate, but he thought that noises arising from motor omnibuses in the first place went far beyond the period that the public was prepared to extend its indulgence. If police inspectors had shown greater stringency earlier, a certain amount of public feeling which had been engendered in this matter would never have been brought about. He thought extremes were always unwise, and some of the present actions of the police were, if he might use the terms, without risk of misunderstanding, distinctly reprehensible and mistaken. There was a great LACK OF UNIFORMITY between the action of one inspector and another as regarded stop" notices. He had known cases where eight omnibuses were stopped at a fell swoop by one inspector, and, without even the application of a spanner to one of them, were passed the next morning by another inspector. That was a highly unsatisfactory state of things, and it was also a great hardship upon the men in charge of those vehicles. In what had been said with reference to the bogey of top-heaviness he quite agreed with the reader of the paper.
Mr. F. C. A. COVENTRY, Chairman of the Society, in seconding the vote of thanks, said the members were most grateful to Mr. Mackenzie for the trouble he had taken in perparing his paper. Personally, his own experience had been entirely with country traffic, and, therefore, the burning question of "stop"
notices had no interest for him. With regard to what Mr. Mackenzie had said about motor-omnibus chassis, he thought those now in use in London would not be equally suitable for the country. A motorcar which had to run, perhaps, for six miles on the level, and then to ascend a steep hill with a gradient of 1 in 10, was quite different to the vehicle which would suit London. A very large engine would be required in London, either with a slipping clutch or some kind of petrol-electric or electric drive. Mr. Mackenzie had mentioned water-cooled brakes : of course, they would be satisfactory if any one coutd make one that would not get out of order so easily, but, when they were used on country roads, the pipes got stopped up with mud and they became useless. Mr. Mackenzie was very strong on tires wearing out through their being cut ; he did not think that was correct, because he usually found that, when A TIRE HAD BEEN "NICELY" CUT, it lasted a long time. He had known tires which had been badly cut do over 20,000 miles. As for body damage, he thought the upkeep of a body in London was no more than in the country, because, in the country, an enormous amount of mud was thrown up on to the paint work, and this destroyed the varnish. Again, cars running along the sea front at seaside towns, where the sea broke over the body, caused very rapid deterioration. As for Parsons' chains, they were only fitted on the small omnibuses, and he did not think they had been tried on really heavy cars. The strain on any form of chain attached to heavy cars would be enormous, and he had never found anything that would hold on the Torquay roads. In reference to body dimensions, one of the chief improvements ought to be to make a comfortable scat for the top. The present seats were not designed for any special shape, and it was quite easy to curve them slightly so as to make them more comfortable. In the country they had found this to be a necessity, where passengers had frequently to sit on the top of an omnibus for hours at a time. With regard to the railway system of training drivers, it sounded very nice on paper, but as soon as a man got beyond the first stage of training he thought he was quite competent to drive, and, if he got as far as the lorry stage, he at once left his employment, and was able to get a good position. In the case of a railway company, the men who started their training as engine drivers could not leave, and they usually stayed until they retired through old age. He had much pleasure in seconding the vote of thanks. Dr. II. S. HELE-Suaw, who was specially invited to speak by Lord Montagu, said it occurred to him that Mr. Mackenzie was drawing rather too much distinction between London and the provinces. Personally, he was a provincial man, although he knew something about large cities. It should not be forgotten that there was such a thing as educating the public up to travelling. The London public had been educated in regard to travelling about all parts of this great city, in a way in which even the people of the cities of Liverpool and Birmingham were not accustomed until the arrival of the electric tramcar. As they were all aware, the statistics brought up with regard to the number of persons likely to travel before the introduction of electric trams had PROVED ABSOLUTELY FALLACIOUS, and it was quite a mystery where all the millions of people came from who now travelled on tramcars. He believed that, if the present motor-omnibus services were persisted in, the time would certainly come when, in many large towns, the public would insist upon taking up the tram rails in the streets: he considered they were an unmitigated nuisance. (Hear, hear.) In regard to what had been said about block tires, he had had an opportunity recently, of observing the action of block indiarubbers in Paris, where they have been introduced on motor omnibuses. He happened to be in the depot when a lot of those buses came in, and he noticed that a large number of the blocks were destroyed. As they were aware, the French setts were almost like cobbles, and that might account for the destruction of the blocks. With regard to clutches, it had struck him that they tolerated, in regard to mechanical movements, things which they would never tolerate in any other direction, simply because the damage was not making itself felt immediately. They all knew the extreme complexity of an electric starting switch, and, if they did not have the starting switch they would immediately destroy the electric motor ; but they did not DESTROY THEIR VEHICLE IMMEDIATELY, it might be said, by putting on a clutch, and all knew that clutches could be made to work admirably if they were treated properly. But, if they let the clutches get out of order, and if they treated them as things that did not want careful management, they did not immediately destroy their gear, it was true, yet they did it none the less in time, and, surely, the same amount of care ought to be taken to have a perfect clutch as was taken in the case of an electrical switch.
The CHAIRMAN, at this point, said he should have to leave in a short time, as he had to get back to the House of Lords, where they had begun to discuss the Education Bill in earnest. He had listened to the discussion with the greatest possible interest, and it had been very practical. He quite agreed with what had been said with regard to the treatment of clutches, and their use was one of those things upon which the men wanted very careful training. A friend of his who conducted motor classes for certain military purposes told him that, in training motor men, he had an ingenious device, and it was one which he thought might very well be copied by those who had charge of the instruction of motormen. The device be referred to was an arrangement on the clutch which, if the clutch were applied too fiercely, rang a bell. As long as the clutch went in slowly, and in the way a skilled man would let it in, the bell would not ring, and, when a man went out to practice on a test vehicle, and the bell rang too often, that man was disqualified. For London work, where they wanted immense power of acceleration, and where there was not much hill-climbing, they required a combination system which would eventually do away with the necessity for a good deal of gearing. The points they ought to concentrate upon were licensing and inspection, and the great subject of skidding. Those two subjects seemed to him to be of immense importance at the present moment. On these matters, he did not know whether they thought it was desirable to make some form of public remonstrance, and he did not know whether they had tried a deputation. If they desired to take that form of action, he should be very glad to introduce a DEPUTATION FROM THE SOCIETY to the Home Office, because he felt that this was a real grievance. He thought they might ask the Press to ventilate this question. Something ought to be done pretty quickly, or else the police regulations would become more stringent. He once heard a person in authority at Scotland Yard say that they ought to have gunmetal gears. Of course, he told this gentleman that he could show him that gunmetal gears had long since been replaced by a much better kind of case-hardened metal.