The Very First Automobile

What moves progress? The answer is easy - LAZINESS!
This strain will always pursue human being serving as trigger of technical progress for the purpose of making our life easier as possible. Automobile is one more invention, which proves this statement…

Neither more, nor less, but automobile became a part of our life. “The ideas of automobiles” has been always existing in human’s dreams and imaginations. It was reflected, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches in “Atlantic Codex” devoted to self-powered vehicles, and even Heron of Alexandria wrote about substitution of horse power by steam power and invention of a new way of transportation in 150 BC.

The automobile as we know wasn’t invented in a single day by a single creator. The history of the automobile represents an evolution that took place worldwide. As Nostradamus predicted the extremely first self-propelled road vehicle was invented in 1769 by French inventor Nicolas Cugnot (1725 - 1804). Historians, who admit that early steam-powered road vehicles were automobiles, contend that he was the inventor of the first automobile.
The first experiments with steam were run as far back as 17th century. In 1643 Evangelista Torricelli discovered the power action of air pressure. 37 years after a Dutch Christian Huygens projected a power plant that was based on gas expansion from powder explosion in a cylinder. By the way it was the first combustion engine. The power of explosion was substituted later for steam power by a French physicist Denis Papin. In 1690 he constructed a condensation steam vehicle known also as “steam-boiler”. It consisted of a piston that moved upwards with the help of boiled water and moved down as a consequence of cooling.

Basing on the earlier experiments Cugnot invented the first steam-powered car in 1769. It was a large vehicle that moved at the speed of a walk (6 km/hour) and was meant to move cannon for the French Army. It had three wheels with the engine in the front along with the boiler. The vehicle had to stop every ten minutes to put up steam power. It was far too heavy and slow to be of practical use.

Burning fuel was heating water in the boiler, the steam produced from it expanded and pushed the pistons. Pistons turned the crankshaft, which then turned the wheels. This simple “system” made the first vehicle to move. It’s important to say that during the early history of self-propelled vehicles - both road and railroad vehicles were being developed with steam engines. Steam engines were overloading the road vehicles and they proved a poor design; however, steam engines were very successfully used in locomotives.

Incidentally, Cugnot was the first person to get into a motor vehicle accident in 1771, when he drove one of his road vehicles into a stone wall. The vehicle may still be seen today in the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Metiers in Paris. ...