However, it is unfair to say that either man invented "the" automobile. An internal combustion engine is an engine that uses the explosive combustion of fuel to push a piston within a cylinder — the piston's movement turns a crankshaft that then turns the car wheels via a chain or a drive shaft. The different types of fuel commonly used for car combustion engines are gasoline or petrol , diesel, and kerosene.
A brief outline of the history of the internal combustion engine includes the following highlights:. Engine design and car design were integral activities, almost all of the engine designers mentioned above also designed cars, and a few went on to become major manufacturers of automobiles.
All of these inventors and more made notable improvements in the evolution of the internal combustion vehicles. One of the most important landmarks in engine design comes from Nicolaus August Otto who in invented an effective gas motor engine.
Otto built the first practical four-stroke internal combustion engine called the "Otto Cycle Engine," and as soon as he had completed his engine, he built it into a motorcycle.
Otto's contributions were very historically significant, it was his four-stroke engine that was universally adopted for all liquid-fueled automobiles going forward. In , German mechanical engineer, Karl Benz designed and built the world's first practical automobile to be powered by an internal-combustion engine.
It was a three-wheeler; Benz built his first four-wheeled car in Benz was the first inventor to integrate an internal combustion engine with a chassis - designing both together. In , Gottlieb Daimler together with his design partner Wilhelm Maybach took Otto's internal combustion engine a step further and patented what is generally recognized as the prototype of the modern gas engine.
Daimler's connection to Otto was a direct one; Daimler worked as technical director of Deutz Gasmotorenfabrik, which Nikolaus Otto co-owned in There is some controversy as to who built the first motorcycle , Otto or Daimler. The Daimler-Maybach engine was small, lightweight, fast, used a gasoline-injected carburetor, and had a vertical cylinder.
The size, speed, and efficiency of the engine allowed for a revolution in car design. On March 8, , Daimler took a stagecoach and adapted it to hold his engine, thereby designing the world's first four-wheeled automobile.
Daimler is considered the first inventor to have invented a practical internal-combustion engine. In , Daimler invented a V-slanted two cylinder, four-stroke engine with mushroom-shaped valves. Just like Otto's engine, Daimler's new engine set the basis for all car engines going forward. Also in , Daimler and Maybach built their first automobile from the ground up, they did not adapt another purpose vehicle as they had always been done previously.
The new Daimler automobile had a four-speed transmission and obtained speeds of 10 mph. Daimler founded the Daimler Motoren-Gesellschaft in to manufacture his designs. Eleven years later, Wilhelm Maybach designed the Mercedes automobile. If Siegfried Marcus built his second car in and it was as claimed, it would have been the first vehicle powered by a four-cycle engine and the first to use gasoline as a fuel, the first having a carburetor for a gasoline engine and the first having a magneto ignition.
By the early s, gasoline cars started to outsell all other types of motor vehicles. The market was growing for economical automobiles and the need for industrial production was pressing. By car manufacturer we mean builders of entire motor vehicles for sale and not just engine inventors who experimented with car design to test their engines — Daimler and Benz began as the latter before becoming full car manufacturers and made their early money by licensing their patents and selling their engines to car manufacturers.
Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor were partners in a woodworking machinery business when they decided to become car manufacturers. They built their first car in using a Daimler engine. Edouard Sarazin, who held the license rights to the Daimler patent for France, commissioned the team. Licensing a patent means that you pay a fee and then you have the right to build and use someone's invention for profit — in this case, Sarazin had the right to build and sell Daimler engines in France.
The partners not only manufactured cars, but they also made improvements to the automotive body design. Panhard-Levassor made vehicles with a pedal-operated clutch, a chain transmission leading to a change-speed gearbox, and a front radiator. Levassor was the first designer to move the engine to the front of the car and use a rear-wheel-drive layout.
It is the far more famous Henry Ford who generally gets the credit for the first assembly line and the production of cars en masse, with his famous Model T, in What he did create was a much improved and bigger version of the assembly line, based on conveyor belts, which much reduced both production costs, and build times, for motor vehicles, soon making Ford the biggest car manufacturer in the world.
By , a staggering 15 million Model Ts had been built, and our modern infatuation with the motor vehicle was well and truly under way. We Australians have a long and proud history of punching above our collective The good news is, while your money might be buying you a smaller car, it will Home Car Advice.
Who invented the first car and when was it made? Car Advice. Henry Ford generally gets the credit for the first assembly line and the production of cars en masse, with the Model T, in Stephen Corby.
Pouring fuel on the fire of the first-car controversy It could be argued, of course, that an absurdly talented genius, known to his friends as Leo, beat Benz to designing the first automobile by several hundred years.
Given the incomes of the day, automakers could no longer count on an expanding market. Although a few expensive items, such as pianos and sewing machines, had been sold on time before , it was installment sales of automobiles during the twenties that established the purchasing of expensive consumer goods on credit as a middle-class habit and a mainstay of the American economy. Market saturation coincided with technological stagnation: In both product and production technology, innovation was becoming incremental rather than dramatic.
The basic differences that distinguish post-World War II models from the Model T were in place by the late s—the self-starter, the closed all-steel body, the high-compression engine, hydraulic brakes, syncromesh transmission and low-pressure balloon tires. The remaining innovations—the automatic transmission and drop-frame construction—came in the s.
Moreover, with some exceptions, cars were made much the same way in the early s as they had been in the s. To meet the challenges of market saturation and technological stagnation, General Motors under the leadership of Alfred P.
Sloan, Jr. The goal was to make consumers dissatisfied enough to trade in and presumably up to a more expensive new model long before the useful life of their present cars had ended. Thus engineering was subordinated to the dictates of stylists and cost-cutting accountants.
General Motors became the archetype of a rational corporation run by a technostructure. As Sloanism replaced Fordism as the predominant market strategy in the industry, Ford lost the sales lead in the lucrative low-priced field to Chevrolet in and By GM claimed 43 percent of the U.
During World War II, in addition to turning out several million military vehicles, American automobile manufacturers made some seventy-five essential military items, most of them unrelated to the motor vehicle. Because the manufacture of vehicles for the civilian market ceased in and tires and gasoline were severely rationed, motor vehicle travel fell dramatically during the war years.
Models and options proliferated, and every year cars became longer and heavier, more powerful, more gadget-bedecked, more expensive to purchase and to operate, following the truism that large cars are more profitable to sell than small ones.
Engineering in the postwar era was subordinated to the questionable aesthetics of nonfunctional styling at the expense of economy and safety. And quality deteriorated to the point that by the mids American-made cars were being delivered to retail buyers with an average of twenty-four defects a unit, many of them safety-related.
The era of the annually restyled road cruiser ended with the imposition of federal standards of automotive safety , emission of pollutants and , and energy consumption ; with escalating gasoline prices following the oil shocks of and ; and especially with the mounting penetration of both the U.
After peaking at a record In response, the American automobile industry in the s underwent a massive organizational restructuring and technological renaissance. Managerial revolutions and cutbacks in plant capacity and personnel at GM, Ford and Chrysler resulted in leaner, tougher firms with lower break-even points, enabling them to maintain profits with lower volumes in increasingly saturated, competitive markets. Manufacturing quality and programs of employee motivation and involvement were given high priority.
Functional aerodynamic design replaced styling in Detroit studios, as the annual cosmetic change was abandoned. Cars became smaller, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and much safer.
Product and production were being increasingly rationalized in a process of integrating computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing. The automobile has been a key force for change in twentieth-century America. During the s the industry became the backbone of a new consumer goods-oriented society. By the mids it ranked first in value of product, and in it provided one out of every six jobs in the United States.
In the s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products. The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands. The automobile stimulated participation in outdoor recreation and spurred the growth of tourism and tourism-related industries, such as service stations, roadside restaurants and motels.
The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of inaugurated the largest public works program in history.
The automobile ended rural isolation and brought urban amenities—most important, better medical care and schools—to rural America while paradoxically the farm tractor made the traditional family farm obsolete. The modern city with its surrounding industrial and residential suburbs is a product of the automobile and trucking.
The automobile changed the architecture of the typical American dwelling, altered the conception and composition of the urban neighborhood, and freed homemakers from the narrow confines of the home.
0コメント