No Invention has had a greater impact on the modern world than the car — and many people believe life would be impossible without one.
No invention has had a greater impact on the modern world than the car — and many people believe life would be impossible without one.
Roads have transformed the landscape of much of the world and dictate how cities and their suburbs are built.
Some countries’ economies survive or fall on the performance of their motor industry.
But the world has paid a price for the freedom the car has brought — in environmental damage, crime and road deaths.
Steam-powered automobiles had been in use since the late 1700s — but they were absurdly slow and frequently had to stop to build up a head of steam.
Karl Benz, a draughtsman and engineer who was born on November 25, 1844, the son of a German engine driver, was the father of the car as we know it.
His breakthrough was to build a tricycle-like carriage and attach to it a petrol-driven internal combustion engine.
He built the four-stroke engine himself, based on a decade-old design by another German engineer, Nikolaus August Otto.
Benz’s car made its public debut on July 3, 1886, when stunned crowds watched it being driven around the streets of Mannheim.
The following year another German engineer, Gottlieb Daimler, produced a car and went into business manufacturing them.
Around the turn of the 20th Century, steam-powered cars were still more popular than petrol-driven ones.
But the public gradually caught on that the internal combustion engine was capable of driving the machine faster and for much longer distances.
The turning point came in America in 1908 when Henry Ford’s company made the Model T — the first mass-produced car affordable by ordinary people.
Nicknamed the Tin Lizzy, 15 million Model T cars were sold before production stopped in 1927.
Meanwhile Benz, now a father of five, lived long enough to see the impact of his invention on the world.
In 1926 his firm joined forces with the Daimler company to form Daimler-Benz.
It is now Germany’s largest industrial firm and makes Mercedes-Benz cars. Benz died on April 4, 1929.
THE car’s popularity owes much to an invention by a Scottish VET.
John Dunlop, born in 1840, was 37 when he decided to make a kiddies’ tricycle more comfortable by replacing its solid rubber tyres with an air-filled tube fixed to the wheel rim.
The invention was a huge success, thanks to the enormous popularity of the bicycle in those days.
Dunlop set up a company to make them both for bikes and for the newly-invented car — and thus gave birth to the multi-national company we know today.
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