The first commercially available automobile looked more like a child’s tricycle than a car.
The first commercially available automobile looked more like a child’s tricycle than a car.
But it was the beginning of a transport revolution which would shape the modern world, transforming the landscape and dictating how cities and their suburbs are built.
It has come at a price – in environmental damage, crime and road deaths.
It is perhaps no surprise that the first motorcar, the Benz Patent Motorwagen, looks like a tricycle.
Cycles had been a childhood passion of German motoring pioneer Karl Benz (1844–1929).
In adulthood, he grew interested in the internal combustion engine – which was to be the dominant engine technology.
Until the 1860s nearly all engines – including those in prototype cars – were steam-driven.
Combustion, normally of coal, took place continuously in a furnace outside the cylinder.
In an internal combustion engine, gas, petrol or diesel burns inside the cylinder.
The combustion takes place under pressure, very quickly and repeatedly, as a series of mini-explosions.
The resulting hot gases push directly on the cylinder.
The first practical internal combustion engines were made by Belgian engineer Etienne Lenoir (1822–1900) in 1859.
They were basic and lacked power but were reliable and much more convenient than steam engines.
Lenoir sold a few hundred engines, which were used to power small machines such as printing presses and water pumps.
German inventor Nikolaus Otto (1832–1891) created an improved internal combustion engine in 1876.
This was a four-stroke engine with a single cylinder. The piston’s movements helped suck petrol in and push exhaust gases out.
The four repeating stages were intake, compression, power and exhaust – still the basic design of most standard petrol engines in cars.
Benz formed a company in 1883 and made his own engine based on Otto’s design.
By 1885 he had designed and built his first Motorwagen.
He was granted a patent and after making a few modifications began selling the car in 1888.
By 1893, he had sold 25.
Motoring had a long way to go before it became convenient or even popular.
At the time Benz produced his first cars, petrol was only available from the chemist, as a cleaning fluid.
The first cars had to be pushed to get uphill and were unaffordable for all but the very rich.
But cars did promise convenience and independence, and would eventually rid the streets of horse manure and the clatter of hooves and cartwheels.
It took the entrepreneurial talents of American industrialist Henry Ford (1863–1947) to bring cars to a wider public.
In 1908, the first of a new generation of cars rolled off Ford’s production line in Detroit, USA.
It was the ‘Model T’, which was also made in factories in Manchester, England, and mainland Europe.
By the time the last Model T was produced in 1927, Ford had sold more than 15 million.
Now, more than 120 years after Benz’s Motorwagen made its debut, cars are the world’s primary means of transportation, with more than half a BILLIONon the planet’s roads.
