Lanchester Phaeton

1896 · Flat Twin Car with Epicyclic Gear · Work 261 of 1,871

Lanchester Phaeton, 1896, Flat Twin Car with Epicyclic Gear

The Lanchester phaeton in a Birmingham yard, mid mounted flat twin engine with two counter rotating crankshafts, epicyclic gears, cantilever springs, worm drive rear axle, side lever tiller.

What it was used for
A test car built by the brothers Frederick and George Lanchester in Birmingham, a single example. Coventry University's Lanchester Interactive Archive dates the first run on a public road to December 1895, in Taylor Street, Saltley; Grace's Guide gives February 1896 as the first test drive with his brother George. In 1896 it was tried as a Stanhope Phaeton, which is where the name comes from. In 1897 Lanchester rebuilt the single-cylinder 5 hp engine into a horizontally opposed twin of 8 hp. Series production only began in 1901 with the 10 hp; between 1900 and 1905 Grace's Guide counts three to four hundred cars, and in March 1904 the Lanchester Engine Company went into receivership. Demand was not the problem: the directors declined the capital needed to service the sales already achieved. The 1895/96 car stood in the Radford Works at Coventry until, as the Lanchester Interactive Archive tells it, it was destroyed by fire in the air raid of 14 November 1940, not hit directly.
What was new
Not the first British car. John Henry Knight ran his machine at Farnham in July 1895, though as a three-wheeler first, converted to four wheels only in April 1896, as the Science Museum Group records. Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow dates the Bremer to 1892 and calls it only "one of the claimants" itself. Something else holds up: the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust archive catalogue notes that unlike most British makers of the time Lanchester did not copy contemporary French and German designs but worked from first principles. From the very first car he used epicyclic gearing while his contemporaries used sliding pinions and belts. It was not he who turned that gearing into a mass product but Ford, in the Model T.

Further reading