History of car

The year 1886 is regarded the year of birth of the modern automobile - with the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, by German inventor Karl Benz. Motorized wagons soon replaced animal-drafted carriages, especially after automobiles became affordable for many people when the Ford Model T was introduced in 1908.                                                                                                                                                   A photograph of the original Benz Patent-Motorwagen, first built in 1885 and awarded the patent for the concept


 Karl Benz patented the three-wheeled Motor Car in 1886. It was the first true, modern automobile. Benz also patented his own throttle system, spark plugs, gear shifters, a water radiator, a carburetor and other fundamentals to the automobile. Benz eventually built a car company that still exists today as the Daimler Group.

Karl Benz gets the credit for inventing the automobile because his car was practical, used a gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and worked like modern cars do today.
Benz was born in 1844 in Karlsruhe, a city in southwest Germany. His father was a railway worker who died in an accident when Benz was 2 years old. Although poor, Benz's mother supported him and his education. He was admitted to the University of Karlsruhe at age 15 and graduated in 1864 with a mechanical engineering degree.
Benz's first venture of an iron foundry and sheet-metal workshop flopped. However his new bride, Bertha Ringer, used her dowry to fund a new factory to build gas engines. With the profits Benz was free to start building a horseless, gas-powered carriage.
Benz had built three prototypes of his Motor Car in private by 1888, when Bertha decided it was time for some press. Bertha took the latest model in the early morning and drove her two teenage sons 66 miles to her mother's home. She had to improvise repairs along the way with shoe leather, a hair pin and her garter.
The successful trip showed Benz how to improve the car, and showed a dubious public that automobiles were useful. Benz demonstrated the Model 3 Motorwagen at the World's Fair in Paris the following year.
Benz died in 1929, just two years after he merged with fellow car-maker Gottlieb Daimler's company to form what is today the Daimler Group, manufacturer of the Mercedes-Benz.

The first self-propelled car was built by Nicolas Cugnot in 1769 which could attain speeds of upto 6 kms/hour. In 1771 he again designed another steam-driven engine which ran so fast that it rammed into a wall, recording the world’s first accident.

In 1807 Francois Isaac de Rivaz designed the first internal combustion engine. This was subsequently used by him to develop the world’s first vehicle to run on such an engine, one that used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to generate energy.

This spawned the birth of a number of designs based on the internal combustion engine in the early nineteenth century with little or no degree of commercial success. In 1860 thereafter, Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir built the first successful two-stroke gas driven engine. In 1862 he again built an experimental vehicle driven by his gas-engine, which ran at a speed of 3 kms/hour. These cars became popular and by 1865 could be frequently espied on the roads. The next major leap forward occurred in 1885 when the four stroke engine was devised. Gottileb Damlier and Nicolas Otto worked together on the mission till they fell apart. Daimler created his own engines which he used both for cars and for the first four wheel horseless carriage. In the meanwhile, unknown to them, Karl Benz, was in the process of creating his own advanced tri-cycle which proved to be the first true car. This car first saw the light of the day in 1886.

The season of experiments continued across the seas in the United States where Henry Ford began work on a horseless carriage in 1890. He went several steps forward and in 1896, completed his first car, the Quadricycle in 1896. This was an automobile powered by a two cylinder gasoline engine. The Ford Motor Company was launched in 1903 and in 1908 he catapulted his vehicle, Model T Ford to the pinnacle of fame. Continuing with his innovations, he produced this model on a moving assembly line, thus introducing the modern mass production techniques of the automobile industry.