Don’t know if you caught it last night (if you didn’t, you can look at a report here), but in the middle of his speech to congress, president Obama offered up this little gem, “… the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” There is of course a problem here, and the blogosphere was quick to pick up on it. The US had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of the automobile (though many of the techniques used to mass produce cars to this day were developed and perfected in the US in 1908, thank you Henry). As everyone from bloggers to NPR has been pointing out, the automobile was invented by Karl Benz, in Germany in 1886… except it wasn’t.
While it’s true that Benz was one of the first to experiment with the use of internal combustion engines in automotive applications, and the first to patent his ideas with the Benz Motorwagen, to call him the father of all that is the automobile is stretching the point more than a little. In fact, as I hope to show here, the history of automotive transport goes back much, much further.
I guess the place to start is to define exactly what an automobile is, and to do that, we have to abandon a lot of what we know about the modern car. First off, I think we can dispense with the idea of the internal combustion engine. Let’s cut to the point and say that, in the opinion of this blogger, an automobile is a vehicle that carries its own power source and fuel, can carry a load besides that used to power it, hasn’t need to run on a prepared track (and thus has freedom of motion), and can be controlled from onboard. Honestly, I think that’s a pretty good stab at it.
Given this set of definitions, we’re good to go on a quest. I’m going to point out the efforts of four individuals working either contemporary to, or before Karl got his three-wheeled masterpiece on the road. We’ll start in Germany, in the same year, 1885-6.
4-3. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach: Life long business partners working in Germany at exactly the same time Benz was getting ready to patent his invention. These two were the inventors of the first high-speed internal combustion engine, and the first o put it into a vehicle, a two-wheeled device widely considered to be the first motorcycle. they were also the first to use four wheels on an internal combustion car (the Benz Motorwagen having but three), and the first to install their engine for marine applications.
2. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot: We’re much closer to the beginning here, and that puts us all the way back to 1769. Cugnot’s three-wheeled monster is barely recognizable as an automobile to modern eyes. It’s low efficiency steam boiler enabled the 2.5 ton fardier à vapeur (Roughly: “Steam Wagon”) to roll along at something under 3mph and pull some pretty hefty loads. Engineered at the behest of Louis XV of France, it was abandoned due to cost and the limitations of 18th century engineering. However, if we’re looking for the earliest experiment that satisfies all of the demands laid out in the above definition, this is where it all came together for the first time. Incidentally, the Cugnot may also have =been a participant in the first automobile accident.
1. Ferdinand Verbiest: We’re now very far back in time, and half a world away from where we started, in China as part of a Jesuit mission in 1672. At this point we’re not talking about anything resembling a car, and it doesn’t meet all of our requirements, even if it was actually built, which there’s little evidence of. Still, what we have here is one of the earliest workable designs for a self-propelled vehicle, however small, and as such, the ancestor of every car on the road today. I have to admit, I love this little design (seen in the accompanying picture above), with its modified Hero’s Engine being used to drive an impeller. It’s the first turbine car!
So, we seem to have shown that the automobile really wasn’t invented anywhere in particular. the dream of free-wheeling locomotion has been one dear to man from time immemorial, and has been the work of many people. Between the four men listed here lie the works of countless imitators and innovators who sought the same ideals. The blogosphere (and some news anchors) would do well to remember, there’s nothing new under the hood.
