Today, we offer Anne Boleyn an automobile. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
In 1533 a wool-trader named
John Marmin, who'd been operating in northern
France, was languishing in prison for failing to
pay a debt. That year he petitioned Henry VIII to
release him. The English historian James Alsop
tells us that the practice in those days was to
offer a bribe along with such a request, and he
quotes these words from Marmin's petition:
... in ... recompense of your goodness towards
[me, I] will give unto your mastership a wagon,
which will be a gift very meet for the Queen's
grace. In the same wagon may sit two persons with
ease, and it is to go without horse or other
cattle. I suppose it cost 20 angel nobles in
Flanders. In doing this you shall do a very
charitable deed, and bind [me] to pray for you,
[my] life enduring.
What a frustrating little item to find
in the dusty records of 450 years ago. This unhappy
fellow, wanting to get out of jail, is offering Henry
VIII a horseless carriage for his new queen, Anne
Boleyn, to ride about in. It's frustrating to us
because we know of no horseless carriage that'd yet
been invented in 1533, and because we don't know how
to find out more about the circumstances of this
strange offer.
What is doubly odd is that the "wagon," as Marmin
called it, apparently already existed, and the
value he put upon it made it worth more than a
conventional horse-drawn wagon. More than likely it
was something he'd picked up in trade in the
Netherlands -- a curiosity he'd set aside for the
rainy day that had now come into his life.
If we look closely at his words, they exclude only
animal power, but that leaves alternatives. The
steam engine lay 200 years in the future. Maybe
human pedal power fit the terms of his description,
although pedaled vehicles didn't appear until 300
years later. I wonder if it might not have been
sail- or spring-driven.
We have no record that Marmin's petition was
accepted -- certainly no record that Anne Boleyn
ever rode this vehicle. The one thing this strange
little byroad in English history does is to remind
us that the dream of the horseless carriage was
alive and well even that long ago. Whatever
Marmin's wagon really was, it reflects the dream
that ultimately gave us the automobile.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
