The Secret History Of The First Car Ever Made

In her list of 10 world-changing inventions, the United States Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, ranked the automobile sixth (via National Geographic). Interestingly, readers of Scientific American from over 100 years ago held the mechanical marvel in similarly high regard. More than anything else, these attest to the game-changing nature of the car, an invention that has become so integral to everyday life that many would probably struggle to imagine how the modern world would be without it. People rely on it to travel, covering distances that would otherwise be inefficient or even impossible on foot. Many goods and services depend on automobile technology to reach faraway places in a safe and timely manner.

That said, the road towards the development and mass production of the car was not without bumps, potholes, and obstructions. Like countless technological innovations over the last few centuries, the automobile was certainly not born out of the genius of a single person. Instead, it was built upon the ideas of people working independently, all of whom had to work with the limitations of their time. Here are a few of the most significant milestones in the creation of the world's first car.

Perhaps the earliest example of a verified functional steam-powered car was the one that Jesuit missionary and astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest created in 1672 (via Jalopnik). He even wrote about his creation in his book "Astronomia Europea," which serves as a descriptive record of this pioneering invention. There was just one catch: Verbiest didn't build it for people to actually ride in, as it was merely a plaything meant to help a monarch escape his own boredom.

Verbiest worked in the courts of the Chinese emperor K'ang Hsi in the mid-17th century (via Fairfield University). According to World Atlas, Verbiest initially relocated to China in fulfilment of his religious duties but eventually served the emperor as his astronomer. Verbiest's tasks mainly involved developing astronomical instruments and calendars. However, his creativity and imagination also helped him build what would become a milestone in car history: a 2-foot-long, self-propelled, five-wheeled cart. 

As explained by Jalopnik, Verbiest's cart had a ball-shaped steam generator (boiler) that was designed to shoot steam towards the vanes of its rear wheels. When water was heated in the vessel, the steam ejected by its nozzle effectively pushed the cart via a gear system, making it the world's earliest recorded self-propelled car. While it certainly wasn't designed with the possibility of carrying passengers in mind, it is no less significant in establishing that the concept of self-propelled vehicles was indeed feasible.

On December 24, 1801, English engineer and inventor Richard Trevithick operated a steam-powered road locomotive, carrying seven other passengers (via History). Trevithick's invention was given the somewhat ominous nickname "Puffing Devil," but this didn't dissuade his friends from hopping aboard. Which was fortunate, given how Trevithick's attempts at steam-powered transportation would end up greatly influencing the development of today's cars.

According to The Brooklands Society, Trevithick and his seven acquaintances rode his steam-powered locomotive up a hill for several hundred yards. Sadly, Trevithick's machine was damaged beyond repair in a freak accident, when it suddenly set its own shed ablaze while the inventor and his friends were celebrating their successful test run. However, Trevithick was undaunted — and two years later, he built another carriage at Felton's carriage works in London.

The so-called "London Steam Carriage" became not only the first self-powered passenger-carrying road vehicle in the world but also the first self-powered vehicle to travel through London's streets (via London Remembers). Despite its success, however, work on the London Steam Carriage was eventually discontinued for two reasons: It was simply too expensive to become a feasible transportation option, and it required too much effort to operate. Or, as The Brooklands Society put it, "it needed two men and a bag of coal to do what a horse drawn vehicle could do with one man and a bag of hay."

According to the University of Houston, identifying the inventor of the first true automobile is not as straightforward as it may seem. Slightly less complicated, however, is the quest to find the first person to successfully create a car powered by a gasoline-burning internal combustion engine. While Samuel Brown was certainly not the inventor of the internal combustion engine, he has been called by some experts and historians as the developer of "the first gas engine that unquestionably did actual work and was a mechanical success," as per the "Survey of London" (via British History Online).

From 1825 to 1835, Brown stayed at Eagle Lodge in west London, where he worked on his engine concepts. In 1826, the English cooper tweaked the inner workings of an old steam engine, enabling it to burn gasoline. He then put it inside his car and used it to drive up Shooter's Hill.

Curiously, at around the same time Brown was experimenting with gasoline-powered engines, another English pioneer was taking steam-powered road vehicles in a different direction (per AutoWeek). Inventor Goldsworthy Gurney established the Gurney Steam Carriage Company, which some experts recognize as the world's first automobile company. However, his goal to make steam-powered road vehicles more popular with the public ultimately failed, possibly due to the population's hesitation to embrace new technology and the comparatively exorbitant cost of operating such vehicles at the time.

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's groundbreaking attempts at creating a reliable steam-powered vehicle ended up becoming an engineer's inspiration for the next phase in the automobile's evolution, over a century later. However, it was not just Cugnot's successes that pushed Belgian-French inventor Jean Joseph-Etienne Lenoir to work on his own project, but Cugnot's failures as well.

According to The Motor Museum in Miniature, Lenoir had been reading the stories of Cugnot's automobile in 1851 and was equally fascinated and horrified by the vehicle and the accidents it got into. Allegedly, Lenoir remarked, "Surely there is a better way, let's see about this goblin." Lenoir then proceeded to conduct various trials and experiments over the years, culminating in a major breakthrough in 1858. Lenoir successfully created and patented a "double-acting, electric spark-ignition internal combustion engine fueled by coal gas" (per Live Science).

By the early 1860s, he reportedly equipped a three-wheel wagon with his engine, and managed to cover a 50-mile distance. This experimental car featured a pre-compression system and even a handbrake, with the driver's seat positioned near its cooling water tank. Eventually, Lenoir's internal combustion engine became widely regarded as the first practical, reliable, and sufficiently available engine of its kind. Based on available descriptions and reports about Lenoir's vehicles, he is said to have built an "almost practical" internal-combustion engine automobile that could travel as fast as 1.86 mph.

Per Live Science, an American engineer named George Brayton developed what many would call the world's first "safe and practical oil engine." Unfortunately, safety and practicality don't guarantee success, a lesson that Brayton would end up learning the hard way.

According to Gas Engine Magazine, Brayton was able to commercially release the Brayton cycle engine, a two-stroke system that used kerosene, in 1872. For reference, the four-stroke design patented by German engineer Nicolaus Otto came out five years later. Despite relying on a compressed fuel/air charge for ignition, Brayton's engine had one key difference from Otto's: Instead of compressing the charge in its combustion cylinder, it used a pumping piston in a separate cylinder. The compressed fuel/air charge would then be transferred to the combustion cylinder, which would in turn move a crank by driving a beam via a different piston. It was a system that worked, but in a way that wasn't nearly as efficient as Otto's engine.

Ultimately, Otto's engine emerged as the superior option, and despite Brayton's best efforts to dominate the market, 1890 marked the last year he would be issued a patent for his engines.

With the sheer number of inventors and innovators working on the automobile within the same time frame, the distinction of creating the first true modern automobile could have easily gone to anyone. However, it was ultimately Karl Benz who obtained the patent for what would come to be known as the world's first practical car (via World Atlas).

Benz successfully patented his "Motorwagen," a three-wheeled carriage equipped with an internal combustion engine, on January 29, 1886. Benz's Motorwagen featured an engine that he also held the patent for, said to be the first engine of its kind to nail gasoline-powered internal combustion (per MotorBiscuit). The engine was able to generate approximately 0.75 horsepower and weighed 220 pounds. According to Live Science, Benz also held patents for spark plugs, a water radiator, gear shifters, a carburetor, and even a throttle system of his own design.

Two years later, Benz started to mass-produce his automobile. The evolution of the automobile didn't stop here, though. Many other improvements to the technology emerged in subsequent years, including Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach's four-wheeled Cannstatt-Daimler and Charles and Frank Duryea's first truly successful gas-powered car (per the Library of Congress).