who invented the car

7/31/2019 Who Invented the Car

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Who invented the worlds very first car?

Who invented the first car? If we're talking about

the first modern automobile, then it's Karl Benz in 1886. But long before him, there were strange

forerunners to the today's cars, including toys for emperors, steam-powered artillery carriers, and

clanking, creaking British buses.

Humans have possessed knowledge of the wheel for several thousand years, and we've beenusing animals as a source of transportation for nearly that long. So, in some sense, the earliest

forerunners of the car date back to the earliest mists of our prehistory. But perhaps a more useful

way of thinking of the car is anything that could reasonably be called an "automobile" - in other

words, any vehicle capable of propelling itself. In that case, we're at most talking about 439 yearsof car history.

The Emperor's Toy

The very first car might well have been theinvention of a Flemish missionary named Ferdinand Verbiest. Born in Flanders in 1623, Verbiestwas an accomplished astronomer who left Europe for China in 1658. He helped to modernize the


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now outmoded Chinese astronomy using recent European innovations, and he was asked by the

emperor to become the director of the newly refurbished Beijing Ancient Observatory. What'smore, he spoke at least five languages fluently, wrote thirty books, was a skilled diplomat and

mapmaker, and tutored the long-lived Kangxi Emperor in everything from mathematics to

poetry. He was, even by the standards of the time, ridiculously accomplished.

But the reason why we're talking about Verbiest here is that he might - emphasis on might- have

invented the world's first car. According to Verbiest's own textAstronomia Europea, he built asmall, self-propelled vehicle. Steam technology was still in its infancy at the time, but Verbiest

was able to build a rudimentary, ball-shaped boiler, which then forced steam towards a turbine

that could turn the back wheels. Verbiest says the vehicle was meant to be a toy for the emperor.

Considering this is over 200 years before the

construction of what's generally considered the first modern automobile, this is a remarkable

achievement, but there are some pretty big caveats here. I said the car was small, and it was:about two feet long, far too tiny for any human to ride in it. It's also not at all clear whether the

toy was ever built, or if it purely existed as a design in Verbiest's imagination.

We do know Verbiest's close relationship with the emperor gave him access to the finest

metalworkers China had to offer, so it's not impossible that he built the toy. What we can say is

this - Verbiest almost certainly designed what was effectively one of the earliest scale models of

an automobile. (Although, if we're just talking about designs for cars, thenLeonardo da Vincihas Verbiest beatby a good two hundred years. But Leonardo definitely didn't build his, so

Verbiest has that on him.)

The First Engine

To some extent, 1672 might seem surprisingly recent for the first car ever. After all, we keep

discovering far more ancient analogues for modern items, including everything fromBabylonian

museumstoRoman fishtanks. So why haven't we discovered an ancient Egyptian car inside the

pyramids, or even some medieval gadgetry that vaguely approximates an automobile?

Part of the reason why it took until 1672 for anyone to even build a toy version of a car was that

there was just no need for them, and it wasn't really the sort of thing one could invent in one fellswoop. In World History of the Automobile, Erik Eckermann explains the basic problem:
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The wagon existed in its animal-drawn form for thousands of years before it was possible to

make it self-propelled, literally "auto-mobile." In the process, motorized vehicles were farremoved from the center of scientific and mechanical inquiry. From the end of the seventeenth

century, existing vehicular technology was more than adequate to meet societal demands. In the

age of absolute monarchs and mercantilism, it was more important to solve other engineering

challenges that were difficult or impossible to achieve with conventional energy sources such asmuscle, wind, or water power.

And what were these more important engineering challenges?As Eckermann explains, "the fountains and water displays of baroque gardens" were a higher

priority for inventors and scholars than was the creation of a self-propelling vehicle. While no

one was really tackling this subject directly, the legendary Dutch scientist Christian Huygens didtake a crucial step towards the car in 1673, one year after Verbiest reputedly began work on his

toy for the emperor of China.

Huygens built upon previous experiments by other scientists to create a simple engine powered

by, awesomely enough, gunpowder. By exploding the material inside a cylinder, Huygens was

able to create a vacuum, which in turn forced a piston to move down the cylinder. This createdwork, making it effectively the earliest recognizable forerunner of the internal combustion

engine. And, for his part, Huygens immediately recognized the engine's potential as a power

source for land and water vehicles alike, but his engine was far too primitive to be of much use in

that direction.

Cugnot's Car

The 1700s were dominated by various inventors working to perfect the steam engine - Thomas

Newcomen and James Watt are probably the most famous of these, but there were many more.But the first person to take a steam engine and place it on a full-sized vehicle was probably a

Frenchman named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, who between 1769 and 1771 built a steam-powered

automobile more than thirty years before the railway's first steam locomotive.

Cugnot's design was, to put it mildly, unique.Thecontraption weighed about 2.5 tons, had two big wheels in the back and a single thick central
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wheel at the front, and could seat four people. The boiler was placed well out in the front, which

made the vehicle even more fiendishly difficult to control. While its top speed was meant to beabout five miles per hour, it never even got close to that fast in practice.

Opinion is somewhat divided over how well the thing actually worked - in fairness, various

government ministers were supposed to be impressed with the initial trials - although most agreethat it had poor weight distribution and so was unable to handle even moderately rough terrain.

Since its intended purpose was as a transport for heavy artillery on the battlefield, that has to beconsidered a drawback.

One story says that the second of Cugnot's two vehicles crashed into a wall in 1771, which mightmake it the first ever automobile accident. It's a good story, but unfortunately no one wrote about

it until 1801, some thirty years later, which makes it rather more likely that this was just a bit of

folklore. Either way, here's a rather awesome reconstruction of the crash, completely with

ludicrously over-the-top reaction shots.

The Steam Buses

As France fell into the grips of revolution,

Cugnot's work was largely forgotten, and the next big innovations in automobile technology

came in Britain. Over the next several decades, various inventors worked on steam carriages,which resembled a cross between buses and rail locomotives. William Murdoch created a
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working model of one of these in 1784, but it wouldn't be until the beginning of the 19th century

that Richard Trevithick was able to get a full-sized vehicle on the road.

Steam-powered mass transit had some limited success in the opening years of the 1800s, but it

wasn't until the 1820s and 1830s that steam buses began gaining some measure of popularity

with the British public. Further technological innovations in this early form of road-based masstransit including better brakes, a more advanced transmission, and improved steering.

But, as Erik Eckermann explains, the drawbacks stillfaroutweighed the advantages of this new

technology:

It was apparent that the technology was not yet fully developed, and this new means of

transportation did not yet enjoy favorable public opinion. Crankshafts snapped, lines leaked,

chains broke, and boilers exploded. Engine vibrations (which, unlike stationary installations,could not be overcome by mounting on a solid foundation, the pungent odor of burnt oil, and

flying soot and coal dust soon drove the traveling public back to the old standby, the horse-

drawn stage, or another new invention, the railway and its rapidly growing network of track.

The steam buses proved to be something of a dead end, and engineers turned their attention to

traction engines, which were slower, more stable machines that were basically just steamlocomotives adapted for use on land. This was a move away from the line of innovation that

would eventually lead to the car, but even these proved too raucous for the public at large. TheLocomotive Act of 1865 said no land vehicle could travel faster than 4 miles per hour, and that

all such vehicles had to be preceded by a man waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This wasnot, as you might imagine, the automotive industry's finest hour.

Other Curiosities

There were several other attempts to build self-

propelled vehicles, but none of them ever quite made that big leap to become the first practicalautomobile. An American inventor named Oliver Evans built the "Oruktor Amphibolis", a

steam-powered dredging device that became more powerful and elaborate with each subsequent

retelling, in part because Evans felt he never got proper credit for his engineering prowess. Atthis point, it's difficult to say with certainty exactly whatthe Oruktor Amphibolis was actually

capable of.


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Russian inventor Ivan Kulibin came other with a steam-powered vehicle in the 1780s, and it

featured plenty of modern automotive hallmarks, including brakes, gearbox, flywheel, andbearing. The problem is that, though it did have a steam engine component, it still required

human peddling to operate, so it can't really be considered an automobile.

While steam remained the main focus of inventors in search of a practical automobile, the resultsremained difficult to control and incapable of reaching speeds much over about five miles per

hour. (In fairness, subsequent innovations in the late 1800s and early 1900s did result in actuallypractical steam cars.) The internal combustion engine provided the pathway to the first modern

automobiles, with Karl Benz generally getting the credit for the first successful invention in

1886.

But now we're starting to cross over into the modern history of automobiles, so this is where I

will stop. Here's to all the crazy forerunners of our modern marvel, be they Flemish polymath

toymakers, Frenchmen crashing into walls, Dutchmen building engines out of gunpowder, orBrits crowding themselves onto noisy, supremely dangerous steam buses. All these innovators

offer a very clear lesson: if you're going to fail to invent the automobile, at least fail with style

who invented the car

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