Car history

• Introduction

The history of cars began in 1769 with the creation of steam-powered vehicles capable of transporting cargo and people. In 1806, the first vehicles powered by an internal combustion engine running on gas fuel appeared, which in 1885 led to the introduction of the ubiquitous modern gasoline or diesel engine with internal combustion. Electric cars appeared briefly at the turn of the 20th century, disappearing from the use by the end of the 20th century, but reappearing at the beginning of the 21st century. The early history of the car can be divided into several phases based on the prevailing modes of operation and type of fuel. Later periods of car development were defined by trends in appearance, car size, and fuel consumption.

• The first cars

Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of the Jesuit mission in China, made the first steam-powered vehicle in 1672 as a gift-toy for the Chinese emperor. The vehicle was small enough that it could not be operated manually, but it remained in history as the first steam-powered vehicle.

Self-propelled steam-powered vehicles that are large enough to transport people and cargo were first designed in the late 18th century. The Frenchman Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot demonstrated his vehicle under the name fardier à vapor (steam freight car), an experimental steam-powered artillery tractor 1770-71. years. As the design of this vehicle proved impractical, his invention was not further developed in his native France. The Innovation Center has been relocated to the UK. In 1784 William Murdoch built a steam-powered freight vehicle in Redruth, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick constructed and transported a full-size steam vehicle through the streets of Camborne.

Such vehicles were in vogue and over the next few decades innovations such as the handbrake, gearshift transmission as well as various steering mechanisms developed rapidly. Some vehicles were commercially successful through the provision of mass transport of people and cargo until the so-called "vehicles" were adopted against these large and fast vehicles at the time. The Locomotive Act of 1865, a law requiring a man waving a red flag and blowing a horn in front of self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom to warn pedestrians. Such a law definitely stopped the development of automobiles in Great Britain until the end of the 19th century, so that inventors and engineers moved their efforts towards improving the development of railway locomotives and rail transport. The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need to wave the red flag was dropped in 1878. The first automobile patent in the United States was filed by Oliver Evans in 1789, as he imagined, as illustrated by the first photograph.

After great efforts in 1815, Professor Josef Bozek from the Prague Polytechnic Academy made a car powered by oil vapor. Walter Hancock, a builder, and driver of London steam buses, constructed in 1838 an open car with four steam-powered cars. What some people define as the first "real" car was produced by the French designer Amédée Bollée in 1873. He made a self-propelled steam vehicle to transport passengers.

American George B. Selden filed a similar patent application on May 8, 1879. His patent contained not only an engine but also a complete four-wheeled vehicle. Selden filed a series of amendments to his patent application, which separated from the legal process, resulting in a delay of 16 years before U.S. Patent No. 5,491,660 was granted on November 5, 1895. German Karl Benz, the inventor of numerous related automobile technologies, received approval for his car patent in 1886. The four-stroke gasoline engine with internal combustion, which is the most common form of modern automobile drive, was created by Nikolaus Otto. A similar four-stroke diesel engine was invented by Rudolf Diesel. The hydrogen fuel cell, one of the technologies celebrated as a replacement for gasoline as a source of energy for the engine, was discovered by Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1838. The battery-powered electric car owes its beginnings to Ányos Jedlik in one of. the inventor of the electric motor and Gaston Planté in the inventor of the 1859 lead-acid battery.

The first truck suitable for use on roads in the United States at the time was a steam vehicle invented in 1871 by Dr. J.W. Carhart, a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Racine, Wisconsin. That determined the state of Wisconsin to offer a prize of $ 10,000 in 1875 to anyone who produced a practical replacement for the use of horses and other draft animals. It is prescribed that the vehicle must maintain an average speed of five kilometers per hour on a road length of 200 miles (320 kilometers). The offer led to the first organized intercity car race in the United States on July 16, 1878, between Green Bay and Madison, Wisconsin. The race route passed through Appleton, Oshkosh, Waupun, Watertown, Fort Atkinson, and Janesville. Although seven vehicles were registered, one from each place, only two were registered for the race: vehicles from Green Bay and Oshkosh. The Green Bay vehicle was faster but disintegrated before the race was over. The vehicle from Oshkosh completed the 200-mile long race in 33 hours and 27 minutes with an average speed of six kilometers per hour. Only the following year, the winner received half of the prize intended for the winner of the race.

Steam-powered cars continued to develop until the early 20th century, but the proliferation of gasoline engines as the main propulsion choice in the 19th century marked their end. Whether such an idea will ever be born in future technological epochs remains to be seen. In the 1950s, there was interest in building steam-powered cars obtained by cooling small nuclear reactors, but the dangers inherent in nuclear technologies soon dispelled the idea. The need for global change due to energy consumption with ideas and solutions for sustainability and energy independence has led 21st-century engineers to rethink the potential uses of steam even if the energy of modern energy sources is controlled, such as advanced electric batteries, fuel cells, biofuels or other. In 1828, Ányos Jedlik, the Hungarian who invented the first version of the electric motor made a small model of the car powered by his own electric motor. A blacksmith from Vermont, USA, Thomas Davenport, the inventor of the first American DC electric motor, installed his own motor in 1834 in a small car that worked on a short circular electrified track. In 1835, Professor Sibrandus Stratingh of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his assistant Christopher Becker created a small electric car powered by non-rechargeable fuel cells. In 1838, the Scot Robert Davidson built an electric locomotive that reached a speed of six kilometers per hour. In England, a patent was granted in 1840 relating to the use of the railway as a conductor of electricity, similar to the American patents issued to Lilley and Colten in 1847. Between 1832 and 1839, Robert Anderson of Scotland invented the first electric open carriage powered by non-rechargeable fuel cells.

The first attempts to produce and use internal combustion engines were hampered by the lack of suitable fuels, especially liquid ones so that such earliest engines used gas mixtures as a propellant. In 1806, the Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an engine that drives the internal combustion of a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. In 1826, the Englishman Samuel Brawn tested his internal combustion engine, which used hydrogen fuel to drive a vehicle that climbed Shooters Hill in south-east London. In 1860, the Belgian Etienne Lenoir invented the so-called Hyppomobile with a single-cylinder hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine that made a test drive from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont in 1860 in a length of nine kilometers that lasted about three hours. A later version of the car was launched on the so-called. ore gas. The car of the manufacturer Delamare-Deboutteville was patented and tested in 1884. In Vienna, then Austro-Hungary, in 1870, the inventor Siegfried Marcus installed a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine in a wheelchair, making him the first man to start a vehicle with a gasoline engine. Today, this car is known as "Marcus' first car". In 1883, Marcus obtained a German patent for a low-voltage magnetic ignition system, which was his only automobile patent. He used this design on all other engines as well as on the next four-seater car called the "second Marcus car" of 1888/89. years. This kind of engine ignition in cooperation with the so-called rotating carburetor made another Marcus car a very innovative vehicle. It is generally accepted that the first practical cars with a gasoline internal combustion engine were made almost simultaneously by several German inventors who worked independently and independently of each other. Karl Benz made his first car in 1885 in Mannheim. Benz received a patent for his car on January 29, 1886, and began the first production of the car in 1888, after Bertha Benz, his wife, proved that a horse-drawn vehicle was absolutely suitable for everyday use with the first long drive in August 1888. years from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back. Shortly afterward, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach designed the first real car of their own design in Stuttgart in 1889, without being a horse-drawn carriage equipped with an engine. They are also credited with inventing the first motorcycle in 1886.

However, the Italian Enrico Bernardi from the University of Padua in 1882 patented a single-cylinder diesel engine of 0.024 horsepower and 122 cm3 of volume by placing it on his son's tricycle, making him the first candidate to find the first car and motorcycle. Bernardi increased the tricycle in 1892 with the possibility of carrying two adults. One of the first four-wheel-drive diesel cars in Great Britain was made in Birmingham in 1895 by Frederick William Lanchester, who also patented the first disc brake. He installed the first electric engine starter on a car called the Arnold, an adaptation of the Benz Velo car between 1895 and 1898. Due to various world turmoils, many early automobile pioneers were almost completely forgotten. In 1891, John William Lambert built a three-wheeled vehicle in Ohio City, Ohio, which was destroyed in a fire the same year, while Henry Nadig constructed a four-wheeled vehicle in Allentown, Pennsylvania. They were probably not the only unjustly forgotten car inventors.

• The age of veterans

The first production of cars began in 1888 in Germany with Karl Benz and in France by Emile Roger under license from Benz. Many others appeared in those years, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée using a built-in 650 cc engine of its own design allows its driver Jamin to achieve an average speed of 45 kilometers per hour in 1897 at the Paris-Tourville race. By 1900, mass production of cars began in France and the United States. The first company formed exclusively for the production of cars was Panhard et Levassor in France, where the first four-cylinder internal combustion engine was also presented for the first time. Panhard was founded in 1889, and soon after by Peugeot two years later.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the automobile industry began its rise in Western Europe, especially in France, where 30,204 cars were produced in 1903, which represented 48.8 percent of the world's car production at the time. In the United States, brothers Charles and Frank Duryea founded the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in 1893, becoming the first American automobile company. However, then Ransom E. Olds and his Olds Motor Vehicle Company (later known as Oldsmobile) dominated the initial era of automobile production. Its production line was launched in 1902. The American Thomas B. Jeffery Company developed mass production of the second car model by producing and selling 1,500 pieces of the Rambler model in its first year of operation, representing one-sixth of all existing passenger cars in the U.S. at the time. Within a year, the Cadilac (formed by the Henry Ford Company), Winton, and Ford also began producing thousands of cars annually.

Over the next few years, the range of automotive technologies produced by hundreds of manufacturers around the Western world skyrocketed. Steam, electric and diesel-petrol cars have been competing for decades with gasoline engines with internal combustion, gaining dominance at the beginning of the 20th century. Cars with two or even four engines were designed, and the engine volume increased to more than ten liters. Many modern solutions at the time, including gas or electric hybrids, multi-valve engines, double camshafts, and all-wheel drive, were rejected by vehicle manufacturers. In 1898, Louis Renault installed a modified De Dion-Bouton engine with a fixed Cardan shaft and an annular Pinion gearbox to create "perhaps the first hot car model in history", introducing himself and his Renault brothers into the automotive industry. The innovation was quickly implemented without clear standards for basic vehicle architecture, design styles, embedded material, or control.

Many cars from that period used a wooden handle rather than a steering wheel. During 1903, the Rambler model had a standardized steering wheel, thus shifting the driver's position to the left side of the vehicle. Most cars moved using only one speed. Chain transmission was dominant over the driveshaft, and closed cars were extremely rare. Drum brakes were introduced by Renault in 1902. The following year, Dutch designer Jacobus Spijker made the first all-wheel-drive race car that never competed.

This remained the case until 1965 when the English model Jensen FF appeared, the first car with such a drive to be used in mass production of cars. Innovations were not limited to the vehicles themselves, but also caused other changes. The increase in the number of cars is driving the growth of the oil industry as well as the development of technology for the production of gasoline (replacing kerosene and coal oil) with improvements to lubricants and mineral oils (as a substitute for animal and grain oils) resistant to heat. The appearance of cars in people's daily lives also caused certain social effects. Music tracks about cars such as "In My Merry Oldsmobile" appeared, and in 1896 William Jennings Bryan became the first American presidential candidate to use a car (a gift from Mueller) in Decatur, Illinois. Three years later, a certain Jacob German started the tradition of the New York City Cabdriver when he was driving along Lexington Avenue at a "negligent" speed of 19 km / h. Also, in 1899, in Akron, Ohio, the first self-propelled police vehicle appeared to transport prisoners, the so-called Paddy wagon.

Since 1900, there has been talking of national automotive industries in many countries around the world including Belgium (manufacturer Vincke who dill Benz; Germain as pseudo-Panhard car manufacturer; Linon and Nagant, both based on Gobron-Brillié models), Switzerland led by manufacturers such as Fritz Henriod, Rudolf Egg, Saurer, Johann Weber, and Lorenz Popp), Vagnfabrik AB in Sweden, Hammel (after AF Hammel and HU Johansen from Copenhagen, Denmark), who produced only one car in 1886. ), Irgens (started in Bergen, Norway in 1883, but without success), Italy (where FIAT started in 1899) as well as in faraway Australia (where Pioneer opened a vehicle shop in 1898 with already an archaic paraffin-powered truck). Meanwhile, car exports began their global growth with the first Koch exported cars and trucks from France to Tunisia, Egypt, Iran as well as to the then Dutch East Indies. On November 5, 1895, George B. Selden has granted a U.S. patent for a two-stroke automobile engine (U.S. Patent 5,491,60). That patent did more as a hindrance than as a driver of car development in the United States. Selden licenses his patent to most major U.S. car manufacturers thus collecting a cash tax on each car produced.

The Studebaker brothers, having become the world's leading manufacturers of horse-drawn vehicles, made the transition to electric cars and gasoline engines in 1904, continuing the further construction of carriages until 1919. In 1908, the first South American car was made in Peru under the name Grieve. Motor vehicles were also exported to the British colonies very early on, so the first motor vehicle appeared in 1897 in India. During this period of development, cars were seen more as a novelty than as a truly useful everyday device. Breakdowns were frequent, fuel was difficult to obtain, roads suitable for travel were scarce, and rapid innovations meant that the one-year-old car quickly became almost worthless. A major shift in proving the car’s usefulness came with Bertha Benz’s historic drive-in 1888 when she traveled more than 80 kilometers from Mannheim to Pforzheim to make people aware of the potential of the vehicle produced by her husband Carl Benz. His cars became world-renowned only when Horatio Nelson Jackson successfully made a transcontinental drive across the United States in 1903. While some manufacturers supplied vehicles with a tire repair kit, the manufacturer Rambler was the first to equip its cars in 1909 with a spare tire that was mounted on the rear of the car.

Named for the widespread use of brass in the United States, the so-called brass or Edwardian era lasted from 1905 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Within 15 years, various experimental designs and alternative car propulsion systems will be completely marginalized. Although the modern passenger cars of that time were invented earlier, they were not in large numbers on the roads until Panhard-Levassor's so-called The Système Panhard is not widely licensed and adopted so recognizable and standardized cars are finally created. This car system has a front-mounted internal combustion engine, and the drive is sent to the rear axle (rear wheels) via a sliding transmission system. By 1906, the development of steam cars had experienced great progress and they were among the fastest road vehicles in that period. During this period, automotive technology developed rapidly thanks to hundreds of small manufacturers who competed to get the attention of the rest of the world. Key inventions were the electric ignition system (via a dynamometer on an Arnold model in 1898 to Robert Bosch's 1903 patent still in use today), independent vehicle suspension (when it was actually designed by Bollee in 1873), and all-wheel brake system (according to the idea of ​​the Arrol-Johnston Company from Scotland in 1909). Leaf springs were widely used for car suspension although many other systems were still in use with hard steel and reinforced wood materials. The transmission and acceleration/deceleration controls were widely accepted allowing for a variety of car cruising speeds, although vehicles generally still had a discreetly tuned gearshift system rather than through the variable system known in cars of later eras. Safety glass on car windows also appeared in that period patented by John Wood in England in 1905, although it became standard car equipment only in 1926 on the Rickenbacker model.

Between 1907 and 1912 in the United States, the High-wheel Motor Buggy was at its zenith with over seventy-five manufacturers, including Holsman (Chicago), IHC (Chicago), and Sears (which sold cars through catalogs). This type of vehicle will be replaced by the timeless Ford Model T. In 1912, Hupp in the United States and BSA in Great Britain pioneered the use of a complete steel car body, and in 1924 they were joined by Dodge producing a body for the Ford Model T. decades before the use of the complete steel body of the car as a standard of change has contributed to the reduction of stocks of quality wood that began to be used for furniture.

Regenerative braking technology saves braking energy and saves it for later use or as backup energy. The energy obtained in this way is used to restore the battery energy in the hybrid vehicle. The German BMW Turbosteamer concept uses energy from the exhaust of a traditional internal combustion engine to start a steam engine that increases energy efficiency by 15 percent.

The compressed air hybrid injects highly compressed air into the engine and reduces fuel consumption by 30 percent. The use of waste heat from power plants as useful mechanical energy for various forms of the plant is also considered. Using the Computational Fluid Dynamics method in the vehicle design phase can produce vehicles that use significantly less energy to develop speed. The Volkswagen 1-liter Car and Aptera 2 Series concepts that have emerged recently are excellent examples of this.

Materials such as duraluminum, fiberglass, carbon fiber, and carbon nanotubes can completely replace all the steel in a car with the potential to reduce weight and increase power. Aluminum, carbon fiber, and fiberglass are increasingly used in cars today. Plastic and special foam for making car shells can provide additional safety for pedestrians and other road users in the event of a collision.

the car industry will continue and get even better.....