2023 Author: Eric Donovan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 15:44
The history of the passenger car began with Carl Friedrich Benz and Gottlieb Daimler. The first forerunners existed in the centuries before.
Several nations claim the invention of the automobile. France claims to have built an early forerunner of the motor vehicle as early as 1769. The military engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot presented a three-wheeled monster with steam propulsion, which was primarily intended to serve as a means of transport for artillery.
Italians refer to Leonardo da Vinci
According to French documents, a certain Alphonse Beau de Rochas invented the four-stroke engine in 1862 - five years before the German engineer Nicolaus Otto, after whom these drives have been called Otto engines ever since.
The Dutch refer to the Flemish missionary Ferdinand Verbiest, who is said to have developed a steam-powered car in distant Beijing as early as 1672. As with many other inventions, Italians can refer to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519). In Great Britain, mail courier services operated by steam carriages were set up in 1820, and a steam line bus connected London and Bath in 1829.
Assembly line from 1913
Not only German automobile historians regard 1886 as the year of birth of the modern roadworthy passenger car. At that time, Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Friedrich Benz not only met all the requirements to be considered the "forefathers of the automobile", not only in the opinion of the large German car manufacturer named after them. These include, for example, the documentation of your designs, patenting, proof of functionality and testing in public. On January 29, 1886, Benz applied for a patent for a gasoline-powered motor vehicle with a four-stroke engine.
America's great hour did not come until 1908: Henry Ford made cars mass-produced. Between 1908 and 1928 the company's founder Ford produced a good 15.5 million units of the legendary T-model, the "Tin Lizzie". From 1913 the "Blech-Liesel" was the first car to be built in large series on the assembly line. (dpa / afx)
