ABSTRACT
The carriage had better steering and suspension than most: the doctor’s previous experiment substituting springs for spokes had not worked quite as well as he hoped, but this new system – allowing the front wheels to turn separately at each end of a fixed axle – gave relatively jolt-free stability on corners, and would in fact later be used as the Ackerman steering system in automobiles. All the same, while being ‘joggled, and jostled, and bump’d and bruised along the King’s high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!’ – as he once wrote to his great friend, the industrial giant Matthew Boulton – the best his pencil could manage was an enormous, shaky script which only took a few lines to fill a page of the small, school-style exercise book he was using.
