History of cars

History of cars

Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, built the first steam-powered vehicle around 1672 which was of small scale and designed as a toy for the Chinese Emperor, that was unable to carry a driver or a passenger, but quite possibly, was the first working steam-powered vehicle.

Leonty Shamshurenkov, a Russian, constructed a human-pedalled four-wheeled "auto-running" carriage in 1752, and subsequently proposed to equip it with odometer and to use the same principle for making a self-propelling sledge.

Ivan Kulibin, also a Russian in the 1780s, developed a three-wheeled carriage, human pedalled carriage.

François Isaac de Rivaz, a Swiss inventor, designed the first internal combustion engine, in 1806, which was fueled by a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen and developed the world's first vehicle, but the design was not very successful.

In 1879, Karl Benz was granted a patent for his first engine, which had been designed in 1878. Many of his other inventions made the use of the internal combustion engine feasible for powering a vehicle.

The first production vehicles in Great Britain came from the Daimler Motor Company, a company founded by Harry J. Lawson in 1896, after purchasing the right to use the name of the engines. Lawson's company made its first automobiles in 1897, and they bore the name Daimler.

Only Mazda's version of the Wankel engine has had more than very limited success.