Unit 2: Transportation Lesson 5: History of the Automobile

Learning Outcomes By the end of this lesson you should be able to: learn about the early history of the automobile Vocabulary & People of Interest “Devil Wagon” Nicholas Cugnot Nicolaus Otto Internal Combustion Engine Karl Benz Gottlieb Daimler

A Closer Look at the Automobile When the first self-propelled vehicles arrived on the streets of Europe and North America, the reaction was often less than positive. Several cities, including New York and Chicago, banned these vehicles at first. Other places passed strict laws to protect the public from these "devil wagons." In 1865, for example, Britain passed a law restricting motorists to a maximum speed of 4 miles per hour. Motorists were also forced to wait until an attendant waved a red flag to alert people that an automobile was approaching. As time passed, people not only came to accept automobiles but to rely on them; and here in the early 21st century most people cannot not imagine their life without at least one. There are nearly one billion automobiles in use worldwide, and that number is growing all the time.

A Closer Look at the Automobile Have you ever heard the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Do you know what it means? For our purposes here it means that people who design transportation technologies are building on the ideas of great people who came before them. Without the work of these early giants in the field, the automobile as we know it wouldn't exist. In this lesson you will learn about some of the giants whose ideas made the modern automobile possible.

The First Automobile When do you think the first automobile was invented? Was it fifty years ago? One hundred? One hundred and fifty? You might be surprised to learn that the first automobile was invented over 200 years ago by a Frenchman named Nicholas Cugnot. Cugnot's automobile was powered by steam and reached an alarming (for the time) speed of almost 5 kilometres per hour. Unfortunately for Cugnot he crashed his automobile into a wall and destroyed it (the world's first car accident). Poor Cugnot didn't have the money to rebuild it. Cugnot's steam-powered vehicle: It was big, heavy, and very impractical. Can you imagine driving a car like this?

Da Vinci Again… Did You Know? Cugnot is credited with building the first automobile, but the original idea wasn't his. Some two hundred years before him, the brilliant Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci came up with the idea of a self-propelled vehicle. This vehicle consisted of a series of springs that were wound tightly by rotating the wheels. When the springs were released the wheels would turn and the vehicle would travel forward. Da Vinci's self-propelled car wasn't built until very recently. A working model is on display at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy.

Nicolaus Otto and the Internal Combustion Engine Neither da Vinci's nor Cugnot's designs were very practical. For the automobile to truly be born it needed an advanced propulsion system. In 1876, a German inventor named Nicolaus Otto came up with a better design. Otto invented what is known as the internal combustion engine. In an internal combustion engine gasoline is ignited inside a chamber or cylinder and a powerful explosion occurs. Attached to the cylinder is a piston, which moves after the explosion. The piston turns a crankshaft which then turns the wheels on the vehicle. Otto's internal combustion engine created a tremendous amount of mechanical energy. This energy could be used to propel an object forward at considerable speed.

The Automobile Rush is On The internal combustion engine paved the way for the modern automobile. In 1886 another German, Karl Benz, invented the first automobile with an internal combustion engine. It had three wheels, ran on gasoline, and had steering and brakes. Benz received a patent for his invention in January of that year.

The Automobile Rush is On Another German, Gottlieb Daimler, improved Otto's internal combustion engine by making it smaller, faster, and more efficient. Daimler took a stagecoach and adapted it to hold this improved engine. This was the world's first four-wheeled automobile. Later, Daimler and his partner built the first automobile from scratch, instead of adapting a stagecoach. The new Daimler automobile had a four-speed transmission and reached speeds of 16 kilometres per hour.

The Automobile Rush is on The automobile has changed greatly over the years, but many of its features, such as the internal combustion engine, remain more or less the same. Over time there have been more than 100,000 patents or inventions on the various parts of an automobile. Did You Know? The word automobile can be credited to a 14th Century Italian painter and engineer named Martini. Martini thought up the name automobile from the Greek word, "auto," (meaning self) and the Latin word, "mobils," (meaning moving).

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