History of the Automobile
History of the Automobile
The first internal combustion engine was built in 1860 by Ettienne Lenoir in France, but it ran on illuminating gas and was quite different from the modern engine. In 1876, Nikolous Otto patented in Germany the four-stroke gasoline engine type used today in most cars.
Karl Benz's first automobile had a mid-mounted engine with semi-elliptical leaf-spring suspension in the rear and none in the front. It had a tiller for steering. The engine was a 1.7-liter one-cylinder unit that put out 1.5 horsepower.
The automobile's time had come in the rich technological age of the 1880's. Everywhere around the world, men worked on motorized vehicles, unknown to each other. Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in Germany; Louis Renault, Rene Panhard, Emile Lavassor and the Peugeot brothers in France, and in the United States, Frank and Charles Duryea, Ransom E. Olds, Charles King, Elwood Haynes, David Buick and Henry Ford all were working on vehicles they called various names. For the most part, they all worked in ignorance of each other.
Benz in Germany was the first to put an automobile into production, a three-wheeler he built in 1885. The date of his first delivery is not clear. It could have been in late 1885, but more than likely it took place in the spring of 1886. In the United States, there were tinkers, but no industry until 1896.
In fact, when Benz first got his three-wheeler running in Mannheim, it was not the first time a vehicle had moved on it's own . The new thing Benz did was he perfected his machine, put it into production and people bought it
Meanwhile, in Cannstaedt, Gottlieb Daimler was working on a four-wheel, gasoline powered automobile, which he had running and put it into production in 1886. By 1888, he had begun talking with William Steinway, of piano fame, about licensing his car for manufacture in the United States. Daimler also got involved in an English Daimler operation and served as a director until 1898, but the British and German Daimler firms went their own ways.
Ned Jordan got into the auto business not as a mechanic or engineer but as a writer. As a reporter in Wisconsin, he met and fell in love with the daughter of Thomas B. Jeffery, owner of the Kenosha automaker bearing. In 1916, the bearing company was acquired by Charles B. Nash, former president...