Race to the Museum: Long steam tricycle, about 1880

This post is the first in a series of eight profiling automobiles in the museum’s collection. At the conclusion of the series on Tuesday, December 21, the public will be invited to vote for one favorite among the eight cars. The two automobiles with the most votes in the “Race to the Museum” contest will be displayed in the museum from January 22 to February 21, 2011.

What’s made of bicycle parts, weighs 350 pounds, and is self-propelled? Not your typical 1880s vehicle. Before George Long, a carpenter in Northfield, Massachusetts, built this one-of-a-kind experiment, he and other inventors built heavy, steam-powered wagons. So why switch to thin, spidery body materials? Long borrowed technologies developed for the high-wheel bicycle craze, which was just taking off. Bicycles were lightweight; for Long’s three-wheel wonder, a tubular steel frame and spoke wheels meant a better power-to-weight ratio and easier travel on rough dirt roads. Adult-size tricycles were safer, more comfortable, and easier to mount than high-wheel bicycles, so Long’s vehicle pointed the way toward practical, powered road transportation.

Unfortunately, Long’s horse-owning neighbors didn’t appreciate his meanderings in the strange contraption, and Long dismantled it. He received a patent in 1883, and although the steam tricycle never entered production, Long, who lived until 1952, was celebrated as an American automobile pioneer. John Bacon, a steam vehicle collector and historian, reassembled the Long steam tricycle and placed it in the Smithsonian. Today it is a treasured time machine from an era when Americans conceived of alternatives to trains and horses.

Roger White is Associate Curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

 

Comments

[Dave]

@Jack

The voting is working as intended: you vote once, and the 2 cars with the most votes will be displayed. Sorry for the confusion!

[Jack Owens]

Your vote totals may be troubled by a technical error. I voted for Long's tricycle. However, when I voted for the 1903 Oldsmobile as my second choice, the check was removed from the tricycle. When I went back and check the tricycle, my check was removed from the Oldsmobile. If this is happening to a lot of people who vote for two cars, the vote will privilege the vehicles that are closer to the bottom of the list and virtually eliminate the two at the top. I found another way into the site to vote a second time and discovered the same problem. [Just for the record, I voted once for the Long and with the second opportunity, voted for the Oldsmobile, so my vote was not tabulated twice for a single vehicle.] I thought that you would want to know about this problem, which should be fixed for the second time you try this vote. Great project!

[Jeff]

This shouldn't be up for vote because technically it is a motorcycle not a car.