The All Color World of Cars [antikvár]

Who Invented the Car?On a house in Malchin in Austria is a plaque which reads 'Birthplace of Siegfried Marcus, Inventor of the Automobile, born September i8th, 1831'. But was Marcus the inventor of the motor car? The arguments have raged for many a year and rival claims have come from all over the world.To try and assess the situation it is necessary to decide what constitutes a motor car. Certainly, the well-used term 'horseless carriage' is not enough. If it were, then the anonymous gentleman who designed a horseless carriage, propelled by wind, in 1475, was the true inventor of the car. Following him came the Emperor Maximilian who, in 1520, invented a lever-propelled horseless carriage. This relied upon men walking beside the vehicle to pull the levers, which rather defeated the object of the exercise, men being rather slower than horses. And between 1657-67 a Jesuit priest, Father Ferdinand Verhiest, is said to have built some sort of self-propelled vehicle in China.The first truly successful horseless carriages were, in faa, steam-driven. Thomas Newcomen created the steam engine as early as 1712 and it was greatly improved by another British engineer, James Watt. But it was the Frenchman, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, who first adapted the steam engine to propel a vehicle. He is said to have built a model steam carriage in 1763, however, be that as it may, in 1769 he produced the first of his two full-size steam carriages and it is to him that most experts give credit for the first mechanical road vehicle in the world.Cugnot was a French artillery officer and his vehicle was intended to be a self-propelled gun carriage. Unfortunately, the weight of the boiler at one end was so great that if the gun were taken off, the carriage toppled over. In any event, it was unstable and difficult to steer. The first carriage ran into a wall andAn early advertisement for Daimler cars. Ahhough Karl Benz was the first manufacturer to sell cars to the public in any quantity, Daimlers subsequently took the lead when Benz failed to expand. Eventually the two firms merged.the second, built in 1770, overturned on a Paris street-corner. It is still preserved in Paris and a large-scale model is kept in the Royal Automobile Club, London.Cugnot's efforts were followed by more practical developments and the 19th century was the heyday of steam-propelled vehicles, both on the roads and on rail. In England Richard Trevithick, William Mur-dock. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, William Symington, Thomas Rickett and Robert Fourness, among others, played leading roles in developing these vehicles. In Czechoslovakia, Joseph Bozeck built and drove a steam car in 1815. In France, Amedee Bollee Senior produced a steam omnibus in 1873. This was remarkable because the front wheels were independently sprung and pivoted individually on separate stub-axles, all foreshadowing the modern car.The Comte de Dion (1884) and Leon Serpollet (1887) were two other Frenchmen who built highly successful steam road vehicles, and in the United States of America, the Stanley and White steam cars -the first prototypes of which appeared in the 1890s and were very popular for many years. Eventually, however, the steam car faded into obscurity.This brings us back to the definition of a motor car. What most of us mean by motor car (or automobile) is a vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine. And just who invented such a machine is, to say the least, open to argument.It clarifies matters only a little to take the various steps in the development of the modern motor car chronologically. If we do, we find that the man who first thought of it was the great Isaac Newton who, in 1688, almost a hundred years before Cugnot's steam carriage, designed a jet-engined horseless carriage. It was never built.Other inventors turned to steam, but it was not until 1804 that Isaac de Rivaz designed an internal combustion engine relying upon hydrogen gas. Robert Street, an Englishman, and Philippe le Bon, another Frenchman, also patented internal combustion engines in 1794 and 1797 respectively.None of these inventors, however, installed an engine into a horseless carriage. That honour seems to