These days we know that every wheel on a vehicle needs braking, but this was not so obvious to our forefathers who thought that having only rear wheel brakes avoided the risk of sideslip. They might well have had a point when considering their primitive high pressure or solid rubber tyres in the early years, or even steel bands on heavier types.
Cars from Argyll and Arrol-Johnstone, two occasional makers of Scottish commercial vehicles, both had four-wheel brakes from around 1910 but in both cases the front drums were worked by the brake pedal and the rear ones by the handbrake, leaving plenty of scope for driver error and the dreaded sideslip.
These Scottish makers were by no means the first with four-wheel brakes as Benz had demonstrated the idea at the 1905 Paris Show, and numerous other firms such as Adams, Crossley, Spyker and Sheffield-Simplex joined Arrol-Johnston in buying the Allen-Liversidge proprietary four-wheel brake kit whilst Isotta Fraschini developed its own ideas. These firms and several others made lorries in WW1, but only with two-wheel brakes.
Back at Argyll, it was JM Rubury who had come up with the successful four-wheel brake ideas and we’ll meet him again later with Clayton’s servos. The Argyll chief engineer was Henri Perrot (previously with French vehicle maker Brasier), who ended up buying JM Rubury’s four-wheel patent for £200 in 1914. Of course, Perrot’s name lives on in brake history for that little horizontal shaft that carries the braking through the complications of the steering geometry. It turns out that the Perrot system scored over the Allen-Liversidge design, which had a vertical rod which passed through the steering pivots and sometimes locked the steering solid whilst braking!
Mention of Perrot reminds usspecies’ Charles Darwin) but he tossed it aside as not being worth patenting. It was then improved by Georg Lankensperger in 1816 who had it patented by his English agent, Rudolph Ackermann.
