Automobile Biographies

Lyman Horace Weeks wrote Automobile Biographies. The book describes itself as an account of the lives and the work of those who have been identified with the invention and development of self-propelled vehicles on the common roads. The text says W. Mann, of Brixton, published in London in 1830 a pamphlet entitled A Description of a New Method of Propelling Locomotive Machines, and of Communicating Power and Motion to All Other Kinds of Machinery.

A biographical sketch says George B. Selden, born in the fifties, came of a family of jurists, whose ancestors were early Connecticut settlers. The text says Sir George Medhurst, of England, about 1800, with his proposed regular line of coaches run by compressed air was, perhaps, the most conspicuous experimenter into this method of propulsion. A sketch of Count DeDion says his interest in an ingenious mechanical device constructed by Bouton led to his backing the enterprise now so well known under his name.