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Friday 15 July 2016

Motor car

Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick built the first self-propelling steam vehicle in 1801. Adapting French and American designs, he took six friends for a Christmas Eve drive through the streets of Camborne in his Puffing Devil road locomotive.


The first ever electric car was built by a Scot, Robert Anderson. He invented the first crude electric carriage in Scotland some time in the mid 1830s .The carriage was powered by non-rechargeable primary power cells.

German engineer Karl Benz (1844-1929) developed a two-stroke engine in the late 1870s. In 1885 he fitted his lightweight petrol engine to a three-wheeled carriage to pioneer the motor car. On January 29, 1886 Karl Benz received the patent for his "horseless carriage" - the first car with an internal combustion engine.

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen was officially unveiled by Karl Benz on July 3, 1886. The Motorwagen was both revolutionary and very, very slow: it could barely top 10 mph.

A photograph of the original Benz Patent-Motorwagen, first built in 1885 and awarded the patent for the concept

The original cost of the Motorwagen was $1,000. Just 69 cars were sold by Karl Benz in his first five years of building them.

In 1885 German engineer Gottlieb Daimler designed a precursor of the modern petrol (gasoline) engine. The following year,  Daimler fitted his engine to a four-wheeled carriage to produce the first four-wheeled motor car. The vehicle had a four-speed gearbox and a crude belt mechanism to turn the back wheels.

Charles Duryea grew up in Illinois with an interest in mechanics, He built bicycles in Peoria until his attention was caught by a gasoline-powered engine at the 1886 Ohio State Fair. By 1891 he had drawn plans for a carriage and engine and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where his bicycles were manufactured. In Springfield Charles Duryea, with his younger brother J. Frank Duryea, built America's first gas-powered highway automobile.

The Duryea car had its trial run on September 21, 1893 on the Springfield streets.

The Duryea brothers successfully raced an improved version against European models and formed the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in Springfield, which in 1896 sold the first American automobile.

Duryea automobile

In France, the first car registration plates were issued on August 14, 1893 along with the first driving licenses and the first parking restrictions.

By 1895, Benz was building a range of four-wheeled vehicles that were light, strong, inexpensive, and simple to operate.

In 1895 Peugeot introduced the L'Eclair, the first four-wheeled car designed for the pneumatic tyre.

In 1895, the only two cars in Ohio crashed into each other.

The age of the motor car was ushered in in 1896 with the first Horseless Carriage Show at the Imperial Institute in London where ten vehicles were displayed.

Edwin Sewell was the first driver of a petrol-driven vehicle to die in a motor accident when his car ran out of control, descending a steep hill in London in 1899. His passenger, Major James Richer, also passed away a few days later.

Damier Benz predicted in 1902 that by the year 2000, car sales in Britain would probably not have risen above 1,000 a year.

The first safety feature for an automobile was invented in 1908 by John O'Leary. He patented a large net, to be installed on the front fender, to scoop pedestrians out of the way before they could be run over.

The 1908 Model T, an American car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company was the first car that was accessible to the masses. It was very simple to drive, and easy and cheap to repair.

1914 Ford Model T Touring By I, Lglswe, Wikipedia Commons

The Model T had the steering wheel on the left, which every other manufacturing company soon copied.

The Lancia Lambda was introduced by Vincenzo Lanzia in 1922.  It was the first car to feature a load-bearing unitary body, (but without a stressed roof) and it also pioneered the use of an independent front suspension (the front sliding pillar with coil springs).

Lancia Lambda (1923)

The first US diesel-power passenger car, a Cummins powered Packard, was built in Columbus, Indiana in 1930.

The first car that had a body entirely of plastic was manufactured by the Ford Motor Company in 1941.

Chrysler introduced the first commercially available passenger car power steering system on the 1951 Chrysler Imperial under the name "Hydraguide."

The ThrustSSC, a British jet-propelled car holds the World Land Speed Record. It was set on October 15, 1997, when the car was driven by Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green in the Black Rock Desert in the state of Nevada. achieved a speed of 1,228 km/h (763 mph). He was the first person to break the sound barrier in a car.

Front view of ThrustSSC at Coventry Transport Museum.

The world auction record for cars was set in August 2011 by a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa at $16.4 million.

The number of cars in the world exceeded 500 million in 1986 and rose above a billion in 2010.

The average person in Britain makes 645 car journeys a year.

Here is a list of songs inspired by cars.

Source Daily Telegraph

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