First
Motor Cars
Many
Patents Later the Motor Car Is Born
It literally took decades and many patents to
create the car as it is today. The first man to have built a car that could
move using its own power is Frenchman Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot.
·
Cugnot built two tractors
that were powered by steam, and these tractors in turn were utilised by the
army to haul heavy artillery.
·
Richard Trevithick who was a
British inventor improved on the steam driven tractor and the steam-propelled
engine by making it a little lighter, smaller and stronger.
·
In 1801 Trevithick made a
more compact engine called the Puffing Devil, and was the first carriage that
was not driven by horses.
·
These were the first designs
towards building the modern-day motor car.
The next logical step was to produce a
combustion engine, as the steam engine lost power along the way as the steam
could not be maintained for long periods of time. The invention of the combustion
engine soon turned this around. The result was that less fuel was utilised as
combustion engines use fuel that is burnt within cylinders and vessels. Two
French brothers created the combustion engine but chose to use this combustion
engine to power a vessel and used moss spores, coal dust and resin to power the
engine of the boat.
Francoise Isaac de Rivaz of Switzerland built
combustion engines for a motor car but the engine was weak as he used O2 and
hydrogen to power this engine, as was the case with other combustion engines
designed by other inventors at the time.
The first electric carriage was developed by
Scottish creator Robert Anderson in 1839, but the car had to be stopped
regularly and re-energized which was hardly user-friendly.
The first contemporary car which was a
petrol-driven, 4-stroke combustion engine and which converted fuel into motion,
was the ancestor of the modern motor car that we drive in the world of today.
·
German engineer Karl Benz
became the very first person to build a modern motor car in 1885.
The first car by Benz was called the Motorwagen
and was driven by a four-stroke cycle petrol engine.
There were other engineers and inventors
working on petrol-driven motor vehicles at the same time, but Benz was the
first to get exclusive rights his engine.
On the 29th January 1886, Benz was
granted the copyright for his very first motorcar which was a three wheeler and
made him the originator of the car as it is today.
In the year 1891 the first four wheeled car
was build which was affordable and by the year 1900 Benz & Cie was the
world’s largest producer of the motor car.
Of special interest in the Mercedes Benz
museum in Stuttgart, Germany where you
will be able to see the progress of the first motor car right up to today’s
stunning modern vehicles.
