Emile Levassor - architect of the automobile

தமிழில் இந்த கட்டுரை

This was first published as an essay in the New Indian Express

Buildings have architects. Do cars have architects too? But think about it! A car has doors, windows, a floor, a roof, seats, air conditioning, radio, television.. a car is a room designed to move! But also - it has an engine, a petrol tank, a steering wheel, gears, speedometer, headlights, wheels…

Isnt a car just bullock cart or a horse carriage with an engine? Did bullock carts or horse carraiges have architects? In fact, in ancient times, chariots, called rathas in Sanskrit, were made by a caste of people called rathakaaras – also called taksha in Sanskrit or thachcha in Tamil; this word also means sculptor. Sthapathis who built temples in Darasuram and Konarak shaped them like.. rathas. And sthapathis are architects!

Horseless carraiges

We saw how Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, independently fitted the petrol engines they designed to horseless carriages. Benz called his vehicle the Patent Motorwagen. Daimler named his motorcycle Motoren Gesselschaft. Daimler also fitted engines to horseless carriage and sold them.

But neither Benz nor Daimler’s vehicles were really cars as we think of them today; they were horseless carraiges. Like bicycles, they had a chain based transmission. The seats were on top of the engines. Their brakes were nominal, operated by leather cords, but effective at the low speeds they were driving. At best, their vehicles were glorified fish carts!

Neither vehicle had a proper steering mechanism. There was no steering wheel, just a rod-like tiller, which demanded great physical strength to operate. Horses and bullocks were steered by whips. Trains ran on rails, their steering needs were very different. Benz and Daimler invented the mechanical working parts of the car, but a lot of things had to be invented to make them usable.

A Marriage, A License, A Newborn

Both Benz and Daimler’s companies successfully sold a few hundred vehicles every year and they exhibited their vehicles in the 1889 Paris World Fair.

Two Frenchmen Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor, who worked for a company that manufactured engines for saw mills, were intrigued by Daimler’s engines. They formed a company Panhard et Levassor and negotiated rights to build Daimler engines in France, with Edouard Sazarin, who handled Daimler’s patents on his engine. When Sazarin died, his widow successfully negotiated with Daimler and won the license to build vehicles with Daimler engines. Then she married Emile Levassor – never have the words marriage and license been simultaneously so romantic and businesslike, in society or business!

But this marriage resulted not only in both a family and business – it gave birth to the automobile as we know it today.

The mindset of engine manufacturers like Benz and Daimler was to adapt an engine to a carriage, made traditionally by artisanal communities. Panhard et Levassor was the first company that decided to make automobiles with no reference to horse-drawn traditions.

Emile Levassor

Levassor experimented with one model called vis-à-vis (face to face) and later, another called dose-a-dos (back to back), which had passengers seated with their backs to the engine, one seat facing forward, the other backward. Then Levassor chose to move the engine forward. Says, Vaclav Smil, “Levassor deserves the honor of having led the development of the motor-car. He moved the engine from under the seats and placed it in front of the driver, a shift that placed the crankshaft parallel with the car’s principal axis rather than parallel with the axles.” Larson adds: “Placing the engine up front under its own enclosure, protected it from dirt and pollution.”

He also designed the clutch, gear box and transmission which mechanisms still drives cars today. In their next model, a windshield and side curtains. This model built in 1892, was called the Cabriolet. Like the word car originated as a contraction of carriage, the word cab comes from this innovation.

The successof Levassor’s innovation can be guaged from this fact : Panhard et Levassor’s cars sold more successfully than the cars built by Daimler or Benz, even in Germany!

Car Races and Accidents

When cars are invented, can car races be far behind? In Paris, in the world’s first car race in July 1894, four cars with Daimler petrol engines did very well coming second to fifth. But the first place was won not by a car, but by a De Dion and Bouton tractor which had a steam engine!

This is one of the other amazing things about the history of the automobile. In this period, steam engines and electric motors were actually more popular and successful than petrol engines in the experimental street vehicles of the day. In the United States, concurrently, Thomas Edison was experimenting with a battery operated electric car, after having amazed the world by inventing the phonograph and the incandescent electric light bulb.

A year later, though, Levassor himself drove his test model in the 1200 km Paris Bordeaux round trip race, his car won. We may not call this competition a race today – the average speed was only 24 km / h. Chennai autorickshaws go through red lights faster than that. But races made cars popular and a number of sportsmen were soon buying and racing cars.

Sadly, in 1896 Levassor was seriously injured while driving in the Paris Marseille race. He died of wounds caused by this accident, the next year. It seems tragic and ironic that the architect of the car would die of a racing accident

But the fundamental model of the car that Levassor gave us continues to serve us today.

The success of the Levassor design so enamored an Austrian businessman living in France, Emile Jellinek, that he asked Daimler to make bigger engines with better design, like Levassor’s. Daimler’s partner Wilhelm Maybach joined Jellinek, who then named this design after his daughter – Mercedes.

Not long after, in the USA, a young engineer refused Edison’s offer of a job designing electric cars and started his own experiments with petrol engines : Henry Ford.

References

1.      Dreams to Automobiles Len Larson

2.      Creating the Twentieth century, Vaclav Smil

My blog essays on Inventors and Discoverers
Contents Page for this blog

Eighteen wheels and gears

This - Finn Murphy on Truck Driving - is an incredible essay, an excerpt from a book written by Finn Murphy, a high-end truck driver in the USA. The general public is interested in autobiographies or stories of kings,presidents, movie stars, crooks, psychopath, artists, athletes, business magnates, monks, philanthropists and sometimes even scientists; but rarely in the stories or expertise or knowledge of ordinary people who are not famous. We are even less interested in people in the working classes, where a lot of physical labour is involved. Their stories are only told by other professional writers or journalists, and sometimes by their children, if they become famous.

I found this narrative riveting, for several reasons. First, someday I hope to write a book on driving, and since I have only driven cars and bicycles, accounts of driving special vehicles interests me. Alistair Maclean's Way to Dusty Death was the first story I read about driving, when I was sixteen, and it was far better when I read it again in my thirties, after having watched a lot of Formula-1 races. I found the movie Rush, about Niki Lauda, quite gripping, especially his philosophy of driving.

The United States is a land of large vehicles, by global standards. I have once driven a U-Haul truck to move my belongings from Seattle to Cupertino. But it’s just a larger version of a car. When Murphy talks about an eighteen gear system, keeping an eye on the tachometer, wariness about jack-knifing, a great awareness of dangers of mountain driving, and specialised instruments like the Jacob brake,  he is talking as a driver whose full concentration is on his vehicle, the road and others. The US has highly structured traffic, drivers have rigorous licensing requirements, as do vehicles, and so on. Most highway driving is quite safe, unlike India, where a moment’s lapse can end in terrible disaster.

Second, Murphy is also an excellent narrator. His passage describing the truck going downhill are almost as dramatic as Alastair Maclean’s passages of an F-1 driver handling a truck on mountain roads. He quotes Moby Dick and Farenheit 451. I was reminded of this New York taxi driver's blog.

We will in the next few decades see similar essays, perhaps books in Indian languages, but currently the reading public is not interested in them (or most manual labour), barring a few rare stories and the odd question in Quora. 

Third, reading Marc Levinson’s The Box,  about containers and container shipping, helped me understand how profound and widespread an impact they have had, but how unaware we are of this impact. I once spent an hour after breakfast, watching a container ship slowly gliding out of Seattle harbour, from my apartment window, overlooking Puget Sound. It was sublime and meditative, in a way that can only be experienced, not explained. And perhaps one needs an appreciation for engineering to feel as I did. The TED video on Maersk  was also quite enlightening. But there are all kinds of other specialised vehicles on roads, and Murphy describes several of them. He also breaks a few stereotypes.

Ferry in Puget Sound, Seattle

Third, the caste system among truck drivers that he talks about. In his book on screenwriters in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screentrade, William Goldman discusses the several caste systems that exist in Hollywood; one among screenwriters, with variations by payscale; a second between professions, with star actors and directors on top, and a whole bunch of technical and artistic professions filling up the lower rungs. Murphy explains a similar system among American truckers, based on the kinds of trucks they drive. They have even developed a vocabulary of insults, and Murphy has often been at the receiving end. Oddly, while movers like Murphy are low on the caste system, they are quite well paid – an old phenomenon in India, where ostensibly high caste brahmins have usually been very poor through history; and hundreds of other former low castes have thrown up several millionaires and billionaires thanks to the Industrial Revolution; and in England where thousands of English “nabobs” who made money in the colonies moved up the ranks of the prevalent aristocracy.

As Murphy notes, “A specialist truck driver makes a quarter million dollars a year
I guess that’s worth being insulted in the mountains by my brethren.” One of the reasons for the high pay, is that his customers are very very rich people, moving all their belongings from one mansion to another. Antiques (granite Qing dynasty gravestones!), art treasures, luxury items etc are part of the set of goods moved. Damaging these can severely impact their moving fees. Movers like Murphy not only have to be expert truck drivers, but efficient packers. The pride with which he explains his packing techniques, can only come from a first hand account. The professionalism of American workers, whether in construction, transport, entertainment, finance, has to be seen and experienced to be believed. I don’t belittle Indian workers, several million of whom do phenomenal jobs with far less equipment at a fraction of the cost. But if they were more professional and efficient, and less superstitious or open to change, they would be far more productive and make far more money. Indians don’t use tarpaulins in construction and leave a thorough mess of paint, sawdust, cement dust and brickpowder behind, which then a lower paid set of workers clean up. There are severe health repercussions to both groups. Pits are left open, badly covered, with zero concern for the public. Electricians and plumbers leave exposed wires, pipes, rusting equipment, overheating junction boxes, bad manhole covers and a hundred other nuisances that make India that ugly sight it is (you will rarely see these in gated communities or corporate campuses, where the managements crack whips). Safety consciousness is non-existent in India and utterly unenforceable by law or social custom.The greatest fortune of Indian working class is that they always have family or caste to fall back on. And they can survive months or years unemployed.

“Books are disappearing,” notes Murphy; he has to pack fewer cartons, obviously.

To those of my more recent regular readers, who are wondering why I am writing about a truck driver, this essay may help.

Other essays on driving

1. The art and aesthetic of driving

2. Indians are such wonderful drivers

The Art and Aesthetic of Driving

I saw the movie Rush on TV last weekend, while Narendra Modi was orating in Madison Square Garden in New York. The movie is about the Formula One racing – particularly the contest between two drivers, Niki Lauda of Austria and James Hunt of England. Racing is the only thing they have in common – their characters are diametrically opposite.

James Hunt is a womanizer, aggressive, muscular, handsome, utterly contemptuous, a bag of testosterone that artists decry in life and celebrate in art.

In one scene, Lauda is given a lift by a woman, Marlene. He hasn’t told her that Ferrari just signed him up. He makes remarks about various aspects of the car. When the car breaks down, she tries to use her sex appeal to get a lift. A passing car stops – not for her, but recognizing Niki Lauda – and they ask him to drive their beat up old car. This is how Marlene discovers who he is. “You cant be a Formula One driver,” she says. “They have long hair, they are sexy, shirts open upto here...” she pauses. “Besides, you are driving like a old man.” Lauda merely smiles!

“Why don’t you drive fast?” she asks.

“There is no need to drive fast,” he retorts. “It increases the percentage of risk. Right now, there’s no reward, no incentive.”

Lauda’s reply is astounding, for any driver. Formula One driver, it is totally unbelievable.

In the brilliant cinematic moment, that every race fan waits for, Marlene challenges him, when he calmly asks, “Why should I drive fast?”

“Because I am asking you to.”

It’s brief, all cuts and flashes and sound effects, but for the next few seconds of film, there’s shifting of gears, the roar of the engine and the uncontrolled excitement of the guys who gave Niki Lauda a lift as he careens their ordinary car through the Italian country side. And Marlene for the first time, discovers acceleration. We have seen far better scenes of car racing, and some terrific driving and road stunts, in movies like Ronin or Iron Man, with far larger budgets. Considering how much time is devoted in movies to races and chases – in bikes, cars, planes, trains, boats etc., the general opinion is that driving fast is the ultimate skill on the road. It is exactly this aspect, and that of living fast, that the movie’s other character, James Hunt displays.

In this context, it is utterly amazing, that the philosophy of driving as espoused by Lauda, actually made it to a film on car racing! I have only known about Lauda’s name – and all I have seen of car racing is mostly Formula 1 or CART on TV. Other races like Nascar, Le Mans etc don’t interest me, and bike racing rarely does either.

Alistair MacLean’s The Way to Dusty Death is a terrific book about the racing world, is a terrific read. But it is a crime story and about racing, not driving. Reader, if there are any books you know about driving – please let me know.

Lauda’s philosophy is about driving. Anyone who takes pleasure in driving a car, derives pleasure in how it responds, how it growls, how it takes curves, the feel of accelerational gravity, how the car eats tarmac, how it glides smoothly sideways, the pleasure of overtaking a whole bunch of cars, the recognition of other drivers or the mild envy or admiration when they see you do something special on the road – such a person knows the pleasure of driving, not just the pleasures of the scenery on the road. Few of us ever drive a racing car or on a race course. For those few of us lucky enough to have driven a sports car, with an engine that can growl and squeal and slice through the wind and delight and exhilarate and put a grin on your face, philosophy is something that you place in the back seat, assuming your car has a back seat.

But : it isn’t really – when you come up very quickly on the tails of a much less powerful car, and its driver pulls over in fear or irritation, you know you have done the wrong thing, the road is not a race course. That philosophy, Do no harm, is part of the basic principle of driving. 

For most of us driving is a skill. For professionals like cab or truck or bus drivers, it is a craft. I wonder whether professional drivers have developed a sense of art about driving.

But truly, truly, truly, for those who enjoy driving, it is an art, and it has an aesthetic. The aesthetics of the art of driving varies from person to person, car to car, place to place, perhaps even with age and company and music and mindset.

"Indians are such wonderful drivers"

As the taxi entered Mount Road from GN Chetty road, Mr  Khalil said, “Indians are such wonderful drivers. The traffic is so disciplined.” You can imagine my reaction. I was just happy the taxi-driver was not listening. “Especially the auto rickshaws, those drivers have their vehicles under such control.” Actually he used word tuk-tuk, which is how most foreigners refer to autos. Extremely fortunate, because while I had a spasm run through my spinal cord, the taxi-driver did not understand tuk-tuk : if he had, his full body spasm would have resulted in our taxi crashing.

“They know every route, they never have any accidents, they drive in such thick traffic with such remarkable control,” he continued.

No this conversation is not a figment of my imagination –it happened in April 2012. Mr Khalil is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering from Cairo University, an air-conditioning expert – he is the man who cools the pyramids of Luxor. On my friend Balaji Dhandapani’s request, I was on the way to show Prof Khalil the monuments of Mamallapuram.

“Nobody in India thinks we drive well, least of all the auto drivers,” I suggested. “Indian traffic is chaotic.”

“Well, relative to the US or western countries, perhaps. But compared to Egypt this is excellent,” he continued, as several autos avoided us by inches. “You rarely see any accidents in India, do you? With this many vehicles there should normally be several more crashes. But people are careful, they may drive close but they drive carefully.”

“What kind of tuk-tuk drivers do you have in Egypt?” I asked. “Oh, it is terrible,” he said. “Mostly, 12 year old boys. They drive illegally with no driving licenses and they have no control; at that age, they will not have much control anyway; and they have all kinds of accidents; they mostly drive in poor parts of Cairo, where there is no other transport.”

Our taxi merged into the Brownian motion of buses, two wheelers near the Teynampet suggestion. A traffic light glowed red, suggestively, and after some consideration, some vehicles stopped.

“And the people of India are so hard-working and punctual,” he continued, continuing his psychological warfare, unaware of the grotesque contrast between expression and reality. “Which people?” I said – maybe he meant the staff at his five star hotel. “Your government employees, for example,” he continued in deadly earnest. “Is this also a case of Indo-Egyptian relativity,” I mused. “In Egypt they come to work between 9 and 10, work for an hour, have a cup of tea. Around 11.30, they prepare for the 12 o clock prayer, at the mosque. Then after the prayer, they have lunch, maybe until 2. Then they come back, and around 3, they are somewhat tired, and head back home.”

I recently visited Gujarat. In Ahmedabad, I saw several collisions at traffic intersections, mostly between autos and motorbikes : in just the two actual days I was spent travelling in the city. Statistically that may not be a valid sample size, but it occurred to me that Madras auto drivers are far better. This experience prompted this blog. Also, an article in Times of India, that some auto drivers conduct charity events, but it gains them no respect or recognition. It occurs to me, that in India, we drive by manodharma, not by law. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It is the law that has to adapt.