Lesson 1 History of the automobile.pptVIP

Lesson 1 History of the automobile The history of the automobile begins as early as 1769, with the creation of steam-powered automobiles capable of human transport. Steam-powered self-propelled vehicles are thought to have been devised in the late 18th century. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot demonstrated his fardier à vapeur, an experimental steam-driven artillery tractor, in 1770 and 1771. By 1784, William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the road in Camborne. Such vehicles were in vogue for a time, and over the next decades such innovations as hand brakes, multi-speed transmissions, and better steering developed. At the 1900s some steam-powered self-propelled vehicles were commercially successful in providing mass transit, until a backlash against these large speedy vehicles resulted in passing a law, the Locomotive Act, in 1865 requiring self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need for the red flag was removed in 1878. German engineer Karl Benz, inventor of numerous car-related technologies, is generally regarded as the inventor of the modern automobile. The four-stroke petrol (gasoline) internal combustion engine that constitutes the most prevalent form of modern automotive propulsion is a creation of German inventor Nikolaus Otto. Early attempts at making and using internal combustion engines were hampered by the lack of suitable fuels, particularly liquids, and the earliest engines used gas mixtures[2]. A later version was propelled by coal gas. Karl Benz built his first automobile in 1885 in Mannheim. Benz was granted a patent for his automobile on 29 January 1886, and began the first production of automobiles in 1888. Soon after, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in Stuttgart in 1889 designed a vehicle from scratch to be a