Today, we track down the first auto. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The automobile is one of
those engines of our ingenuity that always seem to
have just one more antecedent. The first
steam-powered road vehicles were made in the 18th
century. But earlier cars had been driven by
springs and by compressed air. Vehicles powered by
windmills were built before them. Leonardo da Vinci
sketched self-powered vehicles. And 2000 years
before him, Homer wrote about such machines.
So let's limit our search to autos driven by
internal combustion engines and to autos that were
actually built. That laurel is usually given to
Carl Benz. Benz believed in the internal combustion
engine, and he worked single-mindedly to create an
auto driven by one. He succeeded in 1885. He sold
his first three-wheeled car in 1887; he went into
production with a four-wheeled model in 1890; and
today the Mercedes-Benz Company is still very much
in business.
Benz, of course, wasn't first. The French inventor
De Rochas built both an auto and an engine to drive
it in 1862. So, too, did the Austrian Siegfried
Marcus in 1864. Marcus's second auto was a pretty
solid machine. In 1950 the Austrians pulled it out
of the cellar of a Viennese museum. They found they
could still drive it. It had been bricked up behind
a false wall to hide it from the Germans during
WW-II. Marcus was Jewish, and the Nazis had orders
to destroy his car and any literature describing
it.
That's as ironic as it is tawdry, because if the
German, Benz, believed in the auto, Marcus didn't.
In 1898 Marcus was invited as guest of honor at the
Austrian Auto Club. He replied by calling the whole
idea of the auto "a senseless waste of time and
effort."
The search for the earliest
internal-combustion-driven auto ends in England in
1826. An engineer named Samuel Brown adapted an old
Newcomen steam engine to burn gas, and he used it
to power his auto up Shooter's Hill in London.
Yet Benz succeeded where all those others didn't.
Historian James Flink thinks that's because, just
before Benz made his auto, the modern bicycle had
come into being. It had set up the technology of
light vehicles. And beyond that, it had also
sparked the public demand for individual
transportation. And that's why Benz succeeded 60
years after the first auto was built.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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