First motor cars

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 29^th 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.