At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great wars of American Independence, of the First Republic, and of the First Empire turned the spirit of France aside from new effort in the way of any kind of locomotion.
It was in England, towards the third decade of the nineteenth century, that we saw the idea of Cugnot reappear. The same impulse which moved English engineers to build railroads in
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Elevation and Plan of N. J. Cugnot's Steam Car, 1770
order to free the great industrial centres from the economic tyranny of those who constructed canals, urged them to study methods of automobile locomotion on highways. That is to say, in its inception, automobile locomotion was considered as an auxiliary to the railroad, which it really is.
Unfortunately, the promoters of new railway lines did not at all understand the respective spheres of action of the machine on the rail and the machine on the road. They took umbrage at automobile locomotion, and, since they had much capital
