There’s a certain kind of cavalier attitude I like in a carmaker that you really don’t see anymore. And that makes sense; the kind of cavalier attitude I’m thinking of — a certain willful refusal to consider consequences or repercussions and generally operating with the gleeful abandon of crabgrass — just isn’t really compatible with keeping going as a viable company. And that’s part of why I think we’re not all driving Dunkleys today – the company that perhaps was too weird for its own good.
Dunkley of Birmingham was in operation from 1896 to 1926, and in that time managed to make some wonderfully and deeply strange cars. One of their earliest cars used a diamond formation for the wheels – as in one up front, two driving wheels in the middle, and then one at the rear.
This isn’t exactly unheard of, though it is uncommon. The very first Sunbeam used this layout, and I luckily have this informational sign handy I made for that car because Beau has one that we’ve shown at the Autopian Car Show before:
Incredibly, though, the Dunkley version – which I can find no images of at all – was even weirder, as it was designed to only have three wheels down at once, and had two steering tillers. Whomever was heavier, front or rear, did the steering.
UPDATE: Okay, it’s weirder than I even thought. Thanks to commenter Mike, I learned the car was called the Dunkley Moke, and it looked like this:
Wicker body! The driving process, according to this Dutch site, seems stranger, too, as it involved co-operation and rocking. The front wheel steered, the rear was the brake. Each passenger had control of their wheel’s function, so to steer, you needed to rock forward, keeping the steering wheel in contact with the ground, but to brake, you needed to rock rearwards, to let the braking wheel make contact.
I would love to see this in action! Maybe we should build a crude replica?
Designed To ‘Steal’ Gas
That’s pretty bonkers, but the car that really fascinates me is Dunkley’s 1901 Patent Self-Charging Motor Car. The name is sort of confusing, because it’s not exactly “self-charging,” which to modern ears would seem to suggest an electric vehicle of some kind. This was very much not that; the Patent Self-Charging Motor Car ran on coal gas, which is what you get if you burn coal in a sealed container, making methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide, and this resulting melangé proved to be nice and flammable, excellent for street lighting.
Gas lamps all over Great Britain and other parts of the world soon sprang up, with London and Paris being early adopters at the start of the 1800s. Large municipal networks of pipes to transport coal gas were installed in cities, all to feed gas street lights.
It’s from this network of coal gas pipes that the Dunkley expected you to “charge” from. The car was designed with onboard equipment (hose, compressor, etc) that would let a suave Dunkley driver pull up to any streetlamp, plug in their fueling hose, and suck out as much coal gas as they needed.
I suppose technically, the name for this process would be “stealing.”
There were no ways to meter the coal-gas as it was being extracted from the lamp-feeding pipes, and there was certainly no arrangement made with the municipal lighting organizations that would give Dunkley drivers free and easy access to as much coal-gas as they wanted. Dunkley just did it, because, objectively, it’s kind of a great idea! There’s all this fuel for your car running mere feet from where your car may be parked, why not take advantage of that? And if it’s free? Is that so bad? The city can afford a little bit of gas shrinkage, right?
It doesn’t seem like enough Dunkley Patent Self-Charging Motor Cars were sold for this ever to become a real issue, and the same goes for the follow-on car from 1902, the Dunkley Number 3, that appeared to use the same opportunistic refueling theft system. That’s the car in the picture up there; I can’t find an image for the earlier Dunkley car.
Baby Transportation
After an abortive attempt to build cyclecars, Dunkley shifted to the baby-transportation industry, making baby strollers, or, as they would have been referred to back in 1923 Britain, prams. But Dunkley wasn’t going to make some boring push-pram, requiring a mom or nanny to use their own muscles to cause the thing to move, like some sort of filthy ox, but instead would build motorized prams.
They started fairly conservatively, with a pram that had a one-horsepower two-stroke motor, mounted horizontally under the pusher/driver’s feet, and driving its own fifth wheel:
One horsepower you would think would be plenty for a perambulator. Hell, my Changli only has 0.1 hp more, and it’s pretty close to a whole car! Sorta!
But remember, this Dunkley we’re talking about here. They DGAF. They knew that they could make a faster pram, and that was good enough for them, consequences be damned. In 1922, they showed their next motorized pram, powered by a 750cc single-cylinder engine making 21 hp!
Holy crap, right? That’s a bigger engine than the 603cc flat-twin in my Citroën 2CV and makes almost as much power! As you can see from that picture of the Duke of York inspecting the thing, they also gave it what is essentially a full metal automobile body. This is a car. It’s a car, for a baby, with an adult hanging on to those handlebars behind it. I can’t find any references stating how fast this thing could go, but I’m pretty sure whatever it was it was way, way too fast.
Oh, Dunkley! You were too crazy to live, if we’re honest. Gas-thieving cars and superfast motor-prams are just more than this staid world was able to bear, I’m afraid, but I happily salute you.
«perambulator». I learned a new word today.
Prambulator is right there, Jason!
I’m a bit surprised that the Duke of York had time for Dunkley inspections given his predilection for marching his 10 thousand men up and down hills to determine whether they were up or down…
These kind of motorized prams are called STINT in the Netherlands.
They were kind of popular until a horrible accident involving failed brakes and a train.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stint
The final baby carriage with the 750cc engine might as well be motorcycle with a sidecar. With a seated operator it would be safer, plus the baby is no longer the crush zone
Was Bruce McCall Dunkley’s chief designer/product planner?
Sure. Throw a V8 in there between the seats, and let’er rip! And don’t forget to put “Hold My Beer” on somebody’s gravestone!
On a more serious note re the diamond wheel setup: our family business had things that we referred to as “railroad carts” that were about four feet wide by six long, built like a tank from steel with wooden planks for a top surface, that used a tippy diamond wheel system. In this case though, the middle axle held two wheels, while the front and back wheels were centered, raised higher and also non-steering, so to steer the cart you had to tip it to having both the front and rear wheels off the ground at the same time, and rotate. Considering they probably weighed well over 200 pounds, it took some doing. But they could be loaded up with a ton of stone if you dared, and were confident that your path was going to be close to level all the way.
Great story a little bit of a different interpretation
1. A handy would be a great sales presentation if you hinted at one kind of handy and gave another.
2. Come on you accused dead people of stealing gas, while at the same time you promote the same activity for current EV Customers to provide free charging for EVs.
Are we to assume that you feel it is okay to steal electricity from taxpayers today but not steal bbq gas in the 1900s?
Really what is the difference? Could we use it as a modern charger?
I’m pretty sure there’s no EV manufacturers espousing cracking open a municipal street light to steal electricity.
(Although that would work fairly well, now I think about it)
Oh, come on. “Consent” is the difference. Siphoning coal gas without the municipality’s permission is theft. A municipality offering electrons for free isn’t.
Eh? The electricity for street lights isn’t free, and they usually get pretty grumpy when people try to steal electricity from them. In the UK it comes under the heading of “Energy theft” and has a 5 year prison sentence.
I seem to remember a movie in the ’60s, set at the turn of the century, where the villain was running around in a car fueled by town gas and was always looking for unguarded places to fill up. I just wish I remembered literally anything else about it, I think the car might have looked a bit like a buckboard sort of thing, like a cross between a Curved Dash Oldsmobile and a Sears Motor Buggy
Professor Fates Hannibal 8 from “The Great Race”?
https://share.google/uDQPZ5FxVBzbN8F73
I had considered that, but I don’t remember that being a detail in The Great Race? Maybe I should just watch it again and see if that’s it
If it is in that movie, maybe early before Fate builds the Hannibal twin 8 ? I remember a villain (thought Fate) with a hose to get gas out of a house through the window.
That has to be it then, clearly they based that detail on a real car
Thinking more legally- when most houses had town gas and when most cars didn’t really leave the city, it probably would have been pretty practical to just fill up with gas at home. Certainly into the 1910s, gas was still more common than electricity at home
Nope. A movie I know well. There are scenes with gas and all of them are in more familiar gas cans. There are no gas station fillup scenes either.
There was an older, poorly maintained gas station in my town that had a pump that would allow a trickle of gas out of the nozzle without paying or having the pump turned on by the cashier. A couple of people would stop by late at night when the station was closed and fill up, which took quite a while. Eventually the station figured it out and padlocked the pumps at closing time.
“This is a car. It’s a car, for a baby, with an adult hanging on to those handlebars behind it”
What drugs were legal back then, all of them?
Yes.
“You got ghosts in your blood, better do some cocaine about it.”
The horsepower of the power prams started escalating as nanny racing took hold amongst the wealthy families.
Things are different these days and confined to more modest electric powered baby carriages from China.
Nannies are becoming hard to come by due to immigration rules and enforcement, so if you have a fast one keep them well paid and happy. Competition is sure to return at some point.
Combine the baby carriage with the terrifying electric unicycle from the other day, and you’ve got the modern equivalent.
‘fast’ Nannies sounds like trouble….
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.
Does she.. does she ‘go’? Know what I mean, know what I mean?
A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat?
I do wonder a bit Dunkley was considering the coal-gas streetlamps as a public resource, much like rural water-trough systems in the British countryside.
Britain had a large number of water troughs in the countryside that were kept filled by systems of wells and gravity feeds, with float valves to make them self-refilling without overflowing. Frequently set up along the hedgerows, they were available to anyone along the roadside who needed to water their horses or their livestock being herded along the way.
Interestingly, the water-trough system went on to be part of the informal support infrastructure that kept steam-powered equipment in use in rural Great Britain for far longer than in other parts of the world. Not just those lovely Victorian steam tractors that you might see on display at fairs and exhibitions, but the Brits also had steam lorries (or “steam wagons”) that could trundle along at regular road speeds, which operated well into the 1950s and 60s. Steam power goes through water faster than it does coal, so in the countryside it was simple to just pull up near one of the troughs and use a hose to siphon water. Some of them had small pumps onboard to make taking on water easier.
Britain also kept using steam power particularly for rural road paving operations, since steam power could supply heat for the necessary tar boilers as well as motive power for the tractors and rollers. With an abundance of coal to burn, and ample water still easily available along the roadside, it actually made practical sense in a way. This was when road paving was often genuine “tarmacadam” — actual coal tar combined with aggregate rolled smooth.
This is probably something for Mercedes to take a deep dive into…
I know nothing of these;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdDdlDthDpQ&t=15s
Also this;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl72W3dD28Q&t=630s
Your winnings, sir. Captain Renault
Oh, rubber tires! Excuse me, tyres.
They have a few in this part of California, but the steel wheels restrict them to the fields.
The trick is to get a very thick slab of rubber cut to width, big blowtorch (flamethrower) and heat the wheel up a bit. Drive carefully over the rubber and seal the join with a slightly smaller blowtorch. Now your traction engine is a road locomotive!
The proper way is to have purpose built road wheels but changing the wheels on these things is not quite the same as putting the space saver spare on after a puncture!
I’ll file that away in the unlikely event that opportunity presents itself.
A friend has the remains of an early traction engine out in the woods still in the spot it suffered a boiler explosion over 150 years ago.
Nice video… The Sentinels are my favorites!
I like them too, the sort of trick to driving them today is a map showing where all the fire hydrants are. There are little concrete posts with a black letter H on a yellow backgroud scattered around the british countryside for the fire brigade to connect to the water mains. In the road is a little cast iron flap that needs a special key, open the flap, attach a hose aand lots of water happens. The 21st centuary version of stealing gas.
It is really really annoying when someone has resurfaced the road.
I think that’s what we call “drinking from the fire hose”…
So you rock backward to apply the brake?
Well, I can see that not working at all unless you were going in reverse.
What direction was this going in again?
If you want it to rock back you just have to hit the throttle……
Reminds me of learning to drive when I got around to trucks after mastering tractors with hand throttles, and motorcycles with hand throttles.. Then the gas pedal and the weight transfer.. I whacked my head on the back window but good.
I’m thinking that the brake actually worked on the big central wheels. Looks like that in the picture, plus it seems ever so slightly more reasonable than depending on rocking…
Well that would actually work, so it seems more likely.
I can’t imagine this procedure smelled good.
If you’ve ever smelled what I’ll describe as a repulsive combo of licorice, smoldering-hair and heating-oil-that’s-been-sitting-in-a-tank-for-too-long emanating from the ground of a construction site THAT’S the by-product of manufacturing coal-gas. I worked in environmental remediation in the NYC area for years on countless coal-tar MGP sites and while it is truly awful, is it not unsafe as an OSHA PEL to actually work around from what I’ve learned.
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
I kissed my girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town, dirty old town
Ewan MacColl
Love (and miss) the Gowanus.
Wait ’til you try Coke Oven Gas. If the wind is right, you can still smell it near Clairton PA (near Pittsburgh). The smell of money being made /s.
The smell of money…I’ve been told that’s the fragrance wafting off the hog waste lagoons in eastern North Carolina.
When I was a kid my parents were friends with one of the local farmers. Anytime we smelled manure while out driving around, he would say, “Ah, the smell of money!”
At some point I apparently asked my parents, “Where does Uncle Nick have all that money buried?”
When cities supplied gas instead of electricity, it was still used for indoor lighting…a lot of lightheadedness, nausea, and other health issues resulted.
Town gas was produced by the coal gasification reaction, and the burnable component consisted of a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities by volume. Thus, coal gas was highly toxic. In the mid 60’s when Sylvia Plath took her own life, the most common method in England was using an oven with an unlit pilot light. By 1975, the percentage dropped from 40% to zero.
The British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications by
Ronald V. Clarke and Pat Mayhew
Let’s remember the cars of this age were going all of 8 mph.
I believe perambulator is the correct term. Only heathens abbreviate.
…and not moms, please: mummies or, better still, mothers.
So, now we have a new way to refer to a person being heavy.
“I need to cut back on the sweets before I end up Steering the Dunkley.”
Actually, I expect the heavier person needed to be the brake. As you slow, weight is thrown forward. A good heavy set fella’ could just lean back to allow acceleration and steering. Then hunch over for a full panic stop.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers require rubber babies and properly padded pram propellers whilst pilfering put-put propellant.
Oh, sure, when a company that went out of business 100 years ago does it, it’s kinda cool, but when *Tesla* programs their cars to self-drive aggressively it’s a huuuuuuuuuge deal…
(To be read with maximum sarcasm.)
There are those who think that Tesla going out of business would be kinda cool.
Most would settle for just Musk going away.
History repeats it’s self enough the electric dog basket scooter will be all the rage in the cities soon. Equip with on board chargers to easily steal energy from your friendly neighbor mermaid cafe whilst you are all too busy with work sucking down a cocktail of doom
Is “mermaid cafe” autocorrect, a new trend, or the result of rising sea levels?
I believe it to be the result of rising level of fake coffee snobbery
logo for a popular brand of burnt coffee…
I didn’t think it was possible, but here we are.
Jason Torchinsky has declared an automaker to be “too weird for it’s own good.”
Baby Transportation
iswydt
LMFAO, I thought the same thing! Touche Torch
I could see that baby carriage format making a comeback as an electric cargo scooter
Behold! Picture a couple of seats up front with kids making vroom noises.
The vroom vroom noises add at least three horsepower
1.5hp per vroom
Why does that pram make me think about the 90+MPH unicycle article from the other day? I feel if the people riding those hear about this pram, they will be sure to strap their kid in for the ride.
Watching the included video from that was well worth it. Being a former member of the ministry of silly walks, retrospectively think they should be in waiter uniforms and carrying a full serving platter including soups.
It’s called the Dunkley Moke:
https://live.staticflickr.com/7046/6963467476_64b84cbbdb_b.jpg
Nice save Mike! Now you’ll have to scan ALL your books (and I’ll bet you have lots)!
So very many books…
That’s not quite it. The bit about only three of its wheels being in contact with the road at any one time is true but there’s only one set of handlebars at the front which controls both the front and rear wheels. Whichever wheel is under the heavier person is the wheel which steers the vehicle (also to some extent affected by acceleration/deceleration, probably) but it’s always the forward-facing person controlling it. The rearward-facing person instead controls the brake lever. Of course.
Thank you! I’ll get this in the main story!
You’re quite welcome but I’m afraid the Dutch site you’ve cited isn’t describing the Moke’s operation correctly. As shown by the arrangement of linkages criss-crossing underneath the chassis in the photo, both the front and rear wheels steer, deflecting in opposite directions so as to produce the same resulting steering direction regardless of which one is in contact with the road. The brake lever only acts on the driven center wheels.
Among the many issues with this design, however, is that the two wheels being steered can only be deflected by a modest amount before the linkages would rub and bind against the wheels themselves.
“A gas lamp! I’ll STEAL from it! NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW!” – Dunkley owners, probably.
Dunkley may very well have produced more than one of these but I still think it is generous of you to assume plural owners.
I heard this in Dan Backslide’s voice (provided by Mel Blanc screaming his lungs out).
That was the idea.
A man of culture, I see 😉
Did they aleo manufacture little baby goggles to wear while you’re being “pushed” down the street?