In February 1602 something that looked like a small ship came down the beach at Scheveningen at a speed nobody present had experienced before. It was a sailing chariot, designed by the mathematician Simon Stevin for Prince Maurits, and it covered the stretch from Scheveningen to Petten in roughly two hours. Contemporaries put the speed at somewhere near fifty kilometres an hour.
Stevin had built a smaller version first, as a test. The full-sized chariot carried a party of nobles and guests, and Maurits used it mainly to impress visiting diplomats, including envoys of the enemy he was at war with. The prince had hoped for a military use as well. Sand, wind and a fixed coastline made that impractical.
Among the passengers on that first ride was the young Hugo Grotius, who was so taken with the machine that he later wrote twenty-two poems about it and compared it to the Argo.
The princely family kept taking guests out along the sand well into the eighteenth century. According to tradition the chariot ended its days as a museum piece in the old church of Scheveningen.
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