Beasts of burden
Photo: Beasts of burden: the original engines! Photo by John and Karen Hollingsworth courtesy of
US Fish & Wildlife Service.
It all began with the horse. Or the camel. Or perhaps even the dog.
No-one really knows which animal prehistoric humans picked on first.
They tended to stay put, living more locally than people do now. If
they needed to move things about, they had to float them down rivers
or drag them by sledge. All that started to change when humans
realized the animals around them had raw power they could tap and
tame. These "beasts of burden" were the first engines.
By about 5000BCE, there were sledges and there were animal
"engines"—so the obvious thing to do was hitch
them together. The Native Americans were masters at this. They invented the
travois: a strong, A-shaped wooden frame, sometimes covered with
animal skin, that a horse could drag behind it like a cart without
wheels. First used thousands of years ago, the travois was still
scraping along well into the 19th century.
The next big step was to add wheels and turn sledges into carts.
The wheel, which first appeared around 3500 BCE, was one of the last
great inventions of prehistoric times. No-one knows exactly how
wheels were invented. A group of prehistoric people may have been
rolling a heavy load along on tree trunks one day when they suddenly
realized they could chop the logs like salami and make the slices
into wheels. However it was invented, the wheel was a massive
advance: it meant people and animals could pull heavier loads
further and faster.
Huge and heavy, the first solid wheels were difficult to carve
and more square than round. When someone had the bright idea of
building lighter, rounder wheels from separate wooden spokes,
lumbering carts became swift, sleek chariots. The ancient Egyptians,
Greeks, and Romans all used chariots to expand their empires. They
were a bit like horse-drawn tanks.
Photo: The first wheels were made of solid wood. By the early 20th century,
car wheels had thin metal spokes similar to bicycle wheels.
Earlier civilizations made small steps by trial and error. The
ancient Greeks (the first real scientists) took giant leaps. Greek
philosophers (thinkers) realized that a wheel mounted on an axle can
magnify a pushing or pulling force. So people now understood the
science of wheels for the first time. The Greeks also gave us
gears: pairs of wheels with knobs or teeth on the edge that turn together to increase power or speed.
Carts and chariots were a big advance on legs—but they were
useless for going cross country. That's why ancient Middle Eastern
people and Mediterraneans, who lived in open grassy areas and
deserts, developed chariots faster than Europeans and Asians stuck
among the forests and scrub. The Romans were the first to realize
that a car is only as good as the road it travels on. So they linked
up their empire with a huge highway network. Roman roads were
cutting-edge technology. They had a soft base underneath to drain
away water and a harder
top made from a patchwork of tight-fitting rocks.
The Greeks gave us gears, the Romans gave us roads—but when it
came to engines, the world was still stuck with horsepower. And
things stayed that way for hundreds of years through a time known as
the Dark Ages, the early part of the Middle Ages, when science and
knowledge advanced little in the western world.
Things finally started getting interesting again toward the end
of the Middle Ages. In 1335, Dutchman Guido von Vigevano drew
sketches of a "Windwagen". It had the three key parts
of a modern car: an engine (spinning windmill sails), a set of wheels,
and gears to transfer power between them. During the Renaissance
(the explosion of culture and science that began in the 15th
century), Italian inventor Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) scribbled
some designs for a clockwork car. Like a giant
watch, it was
supposed to be powered by springs that would drive the wheels
through a system of interlocking gears. Even though there was little
mileage in either of these ideas, the self-powered car was slowly
coming together and the days of the horse seemed numbered.
Chariots of fire
The next major development came in 1712 when "the very
ingenious Mr Thomas Newcomen" (as his friends called him) built a massive
machine for pumping rainwater out of coal mines. It was based around
a huge 2-m (7-ft) high metal cylinder with a piston inside that
could move up and down like the plunger in a
bicycle pump.
Every so often, steam from a sort of gigantic coal-fired kettle squirted into
the cylinder, moving the piston up. When the steam condensed back to
water, the piston fell back down again under its own weight. The
rising and falling piston operated a pump that slowly sucked the
water from the mine.
About 50 years later, in 1764, Scotsman James Watt (1736-1819)
redesigned Newcomen's
steam engine so it was a
fraction the size and more powerful. Where Newcomen's piston had simply tipped a beam up and down, Watt's turned wheels and gears. Hugely popular in
factories, the Watt engine became the powerhouse of the Industrial
Revolution and people did away with horses for operating
pumps and
other machines. Coal seemed to be the fuel of the future.
Steam engines were soon powering the world's first car. In 1769,
Frenchman Nicholas Joseph Cugnot (1725-1804) used steam-engine
technology to make a lumbering, three-wheeled tractor for pulling
heavy army cannons. With a top speed of just 5 km/h (3mph), you
would have thought it posed little danger. But the "fardier
à vapeur" (steam wagon) was heavy and hard to steer and, just two
years later, the first ever car had the first ever car crash when
Cugnot rammed it through a brick wall. He was given a speeding
ticket and thrown in jail.
Steam engines were too unwieldy to use in cars—but they soon
found their way into other heavy vehicles. In the early 1800s,
Cornishman Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) started building steam
carriages with wobbly 3-m (10-ft) diameter wheels. When one of his
engines broke down in London, the driver left it by the roadside and
nipped off for a drink. By the time he returned, the engine had
boiled dry and the whole carriage was in flames. Around this time,
Trevithick's American counterpart Oliver Evans (1755-1819) built an
ambitious steam-powered river digger called the Oruktor Amphibolos
that could drive on either land or water. Belching fire and smoke
like a dragon, it caused a sensation as it chugged down the
Philadelphia streets in 1804.
Photo: Steam engines were too large and cumbersome to power cars to begin with.
This one is a newly rebuilt steam locomotive working on the Swanage Railway,
England, in 2007.
Both Trevithick and Evans ultimately switched their attention to
making steam trains, but another Cornish inventor, Goldsworthy
Gurney (1793-1875), was convinced the idea of steam road vehicles
still had legs. Quite literally. He designed an early steam carriage
that would gallop along on rickety pins, just like a horse. When
Gurney realized wheels could do the job much better, he built
impressive steam buses and ran a service between London and Bath.
Ultimately he was driven out of business by horse-powered stage
coaches, which were faster and cheaper. John Scott Russell
(1808-1882) also had to close a promising steam-coach business when
one of his buses exploded on 29 July 1834, killing four passengers.
It was the world's first fatal car accident. Horses everywhere
breathed a huge sigh of relief: they'd be around for many years yet.
Or so they thought, under a clever bunch of scientists showed up.
Ingenious Engineers
A car is like a cart with a built-in horse—a horse-less
carriage that doesn't eat grass, wear shoes, or leave a steaming pile of muck
wherever it goes. The engineers who set out to make the first cars
had a big problem on their hands: how to squeeze the power of a
galloping horse into a small, reliable engine.
This tricky problem taxed the best minds of the day. The
experiments with steam had been the first attempt to solve it, but
though coal-powered steam engines were excellent for pulling trains,
they weren't so good in cars. Apart from the clunking great engine
itself, you had to carry a mini-mountain of coal and a tank full of
water. Some ingenious Europeans starting searching for better fuels
and more compact engines. They were a mixture of
"thinkers" and "doers".
Christiaan Huygens
The engineers were inspired by brilliant Dutch scientist Christiaan
Huygens (1629-1695), who had the laser-like mind of Isaac Newton and
the inventing ability of Leonardo da Vinci. He made many
astronomical discoveries, invented the mathematics of probability,
made the first pendulum clock, invented a musical keyboard, and
discovered that light travels like a wave. In the late 17th
century, Huygens had an idea for an engine that made power by
exploding gunpowder in a tube. Unfortunately, he was way ahead of
his time: engineering wasn't yet good enough for him actually to
build this machine. If it had been, the world might have had cars
almost 200 years earlier!
Sadi Carnot
Next up was a French army engineer called Nicolas Leonard Sadi
Carnot (1796-1832), who wrote the original book of car science,
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, in 1824. It was the
first proper explanation of how engines worked, why they made power,
and how you could make them even more effective. Carnot's ideas are
now considered brilliant, but they were published over 100 years
after the first steam engines had already been built. What was use
was science when it came a century after the inventions it tried to
explain?
Joseph Étienne Lenoir
Huygens' idea to capture the power of a small explosion was what the
"doers" seized on. A French-Belgian engineer called
Joseph Étienne Lenoir (1822-1900) was tinkering with electricity in
the 1850s when he took the next step. In those days, street lamps were
naked flames fed by gas pipes. Lenoir wondered what would happen if
he could ignite some of this street-lamp gas in a metal tin using an
electric spark. His "spark plug" (as we now call it)
would make the gas explode with a thump of power that could push a piston. If
he could repeat this process again and again, he could drive a
machine. The "gas engines" Lenoir built made as much
power as 1.5 horses and were soon being built by the dozen. In 1863, Lenoir
fixed one of them to a three-wheeled cart and built a very crude
car. It made an 18-km (9-mile) journey in 11 hours—four times
longer than it would have taken to walk.
Nikolaus August Otto
Lenoir died a miserable pauper because his engines, though
revolutionary, were soon obsolete. Gas was a cleaner fuel than coal,
but it wasn't practical—there was even a risk it would explode
and kill people. Petrol (a liquid fuel) proved to be a better bet, as
German Nikolaus Otto (1832-1891) discovered. Otto was no scientific
thinker—far from it: he was a travelling grocery salesman who
taught himself engineering. During the 1860s, he tinkered with
various engine designs and, in 1876, finally came up with a really
efficient petrol engine, which worked by methodically repeating the
same four steps (or "strokes") over and over again.
Virtually every car engine has worked the same way ever since.
Karl and Bertha Benz
German engineer Karl Benz (1844-1929) studied Otto's work and
determined to do better. After
building a simpler petrol engine of his own, he fixed it to a
three-wheeled carriage and made the world's first practical
petrol-powered car in 1885. No-one took much notice—until
Benz's feisty wife Bertha and their two young sons "borrowed"
the car one day without asking and set off for a 100-km (65-mile) journey to
see grandma. They bought fuel at chemist's shops (because filling
stations had yet to be invented) and the boys had to get out every
so often to push the car up hills. Bertha even had to stop a couple
of times to make repairs with her hair pin and garter belt. News of
this intrepid early test-drive caught the public's imagination; Benz
couldn't have dreamed up a better publicity stunt if he'd tried. He
took his wife's advice and added gears for uphill driving.
Soon he was developing successful four-wheel cars and, by the start of the
20th century, was the world's leading car maker.
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach
Benz soon found himself up against Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) and
Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929), who worked for Nikolaus Otto, until
Otto and Daimler fell out. Setting up their own firm, Daimler and
Maybach experimented with a giant petrol engine nicknamed the
Grandfather Clock (because it was tall and upright). After shrinking
it down to size, they bolted it to a wooden bicycle and made the
world's first motorbike. By 1889, they were building cars. Ten years
later, the Daimler company named a car "Mercedes" in
honour of Mercedes Jellinek, the daughter of one of their customers and
dealers, Emil Jellinek (1853-1918). The Daimler and Benz companies
were rivals until the 1920s, when they merged to make Daimler-Benz
and began selling cars under the name Mercedes-Benz.
Photo: Early cars were literally "horseless carriages": wooden carriages powered by simple internal combustion engines. This one is typical. Dating from 1898, it's suspended at a jaunty
angle from the ceiling of Think Tank, the museum of science in Birmingham, England.
Rudolf Diesel
Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913) was both a thinker and a doer. Confined to
hospital after an accident, he spent months poring over books and
papers by people like Carnot and Otto. He soon came to the
conclusion that he could build a far better engine than the puny
petrol machines Benz and Daimler had designed and knocked up a
prototype, an enormous 3-m (10-ft) high machine, in the early 1890s.
This first diesel engine made twice as much power as a similar steam
engine and, even more remarkably, could run on practically any fuel
at all—even oil made from peanuts and vegetables. Diesel,
in other words, was a pioneer of biofuels
long before people had a name for them.
Diesel was convinced of his genius and certain his engine would change
the world, but he never lived to see the success he'd earned. In September 1913, while
travelling from Germany to England on the mail ship SS Dresden,
he fell overboard and drowned. Some people think he was murdered by
German or French secret agents to stop him selling the secrets of
his engines to the English in the run up to World War I, which broke
out the following year.
Charles Goodyear
While inventors like Diesel were developing engines in a careful
scientific way, a hapless American called Charles Goodyear
(1800-1860) found the secret of making car tyres completely by
accident. After learning about rubber, he convinced himself he could
make his fortune by turning it into useful objects like waterproof
shoes. All attempts ended in disaster and his life became a
catalogue of misery and misfortune. His shoes melted in the summer heat, six of
his 12 children died in infancy, and his family had to live in
grinding poverty eating fish from the river. But Goodyear was
determined. When debts landed him in jail, he simply asked his wife
to bring him a rolling pin and some rubber and he carried on
inventing in his cell. He finally made his big breakthrough when he
accidentally dropped a piece of rubber on a hot stove. It cooked and
shrivelled into a hard black mass that Goodyear immediately spotted
as the thing he'd wanted all along. This is how he developed the
tough black rubber we use in tyres today by a cooking process now
known as vulcanization.
Photo: American inventor Charles Goodyear developed the vulcanization process
in the 19th century. Photo courtesy of US Library of Congress.
The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford
By the start of the 20th century, gasoline-engined cars were fast,
reliable, and exciting. They were also stupidly expensive. In 1893, Karl Benz's simple, Viktoria
car had a price tag of £9000 (about £50,000
today) and hardly anyone could afford one—he sold just 45. Car makers stuck with big, expensive cars,
so customers stuck with their horses and carts. Then a bold American
engineer called Henry Ford (1863-1947) came along and decided things
had to be different.
"It was not at all my idea to make cars in any such petty
fashion."
Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 1922.
The rise of Henry Ford
Ford was no scientist, but he'd been repairing watches and tinkering
with machines since he was a boy. Never afraid of rolling up his
sleeves, he loved machinery and understood it instinctively. His
first car was little more than a four-wheel motorbike that he called
the Quadricycle. When he took it on the streets of Detroit in 1896,
horses bolted in all directions.
Photo: Henry Ford was inspired to build his first car after he saw a steam-powered tractor (traction engine) like this one. He realized straight away that engine-powered vehicles were the future.
Ford must have been delighted: he had no time for horses. Aged
14, he'd been thrown from the saddle of a colt, caught his foot in
the stirrups, and dragged home along the ground. A few years later,
he'd been seriously injured when his bolting horse and cart tried to
smash through a fence. Now was the time to settle those scores.
Ford loved machines and hated horses, so he hatched a simple
plan: he'd make the simplest possible "horseless
carriage" and he'd make it in such enormous quantities, in only one colour, that
he could sell it cheaply to a huge number of people. It took him 12
years to get things right. In fact, he made eight different models
(named A, B, C, F, N, R, S, and K) before he finally came up with a
winner, the Model T, launched in 1908—a car everyone could
afford. Around 15 million Model T Fords were eventually sold and a delighted
(and very rich) Henry Ford scribbled in his notebook: "The horse is DONE".
The Assembly Line
Normally things get more expensive over time—but Ford's
pint-sized miracle car, the Model T, dropped in price from $850 when it was
launched in 1908 to just $260 in 1925. The secret was
mass-production: making the car from simple, easy-to-fit parts in
huge quantities. Other car makers used small groups of mechanics to
build entire cars very slowly. By 1913, Ford was building cars at
his new Highland Park factory in a completely different way using a
moving "assembly line". Model Ts were gradually
assembled on a conveyor that inched past a series of workers. Each mechanic was
trained to do only one job and worked briefly on each car as it
passed by. Then the vehicle moved on, someone else did another bit,
and the whole car magically came together. The first year Ford used
his assembly line, production of the Model T leaped from 82,000 to
189,000. By 1923, Ford's giant River Rouge factory was making 2
million cars a year.
Photo: Henry Ford's cars soon became ubiquitous. This Ford Model Y dates from 1933. Immacutately preserved, it was photographed in 2009.
The fall of Henry Ford
Photo: Henry Ford in later life. Photo by courtesy of US Library of Congress.
Henry Ford was a big success and a people's hero: no-one did more to
put cars within reach of ordinary people. But he made big mistakes
too, probably because he was a mess of contradictions.
Stuck in the past? Ford looked to the future—he grew
soybeans to make plastic parts for cars and experimented with
biofuels years before almost anyone else. He famously wrote "History
is more or less bunk". But, as he grew older, he set up his own
museum, packed it full of nostalgic exhibits, and spent increasing
amounts of time there daydreaming of a lost era. He even had
visitors driven round on horses and carts.
Nostalgic? His assembly-line methods were widely copied
and quickly transformed the United States from a clean and green
farm-based nation into a dirty, smoky factory-based one. The more
industrialized things became, the more Ford yearned for the rural
world he was helping to destroy.
Stubborn? The Model-T Ford was a huge success, but Ford
refused to update it: "There is a tendency to keep monkeying
with styles and to spoil a good thing by changing it." But other car
makers began introducing a new model every year and the Ford Motor
Company lost its lead. In 1927, Ford grudgingly abandoned the
Model-T and closed down his factories for six months while they
converted to making new models.
Arrogant? Ford had strong opinions and never shrank from
expressing them. He ran for the US senate, but lost, and even
seriously thought of standing for President. Though a brilliant
mechanic, he had no qualifications to speak about world affairs.
Racist? Ford bought a newspaper and got into big trouble
writing offensive articles about Jewish people. But he was one of
the first industrialists to employ black people and treat them
fairly.
Pacifist? When World War I broke out, this committed
pacifist hired a huge ocean liner and sailed it round the world
trying to make peace—earning nothing but ridicule. But during
World War II, he turned his factory over to making thousands of
bombers.
Spent Force
Ford built his company up from nothing and was determined to keep
control. Despite making his son Edsel president in 1919, Ford still
made all the big decisions. He belittled Edsel and cruelly
undermined his authority. Once, when Edsel ordered new coal ovens
for the steel plant at River Rouge, Ford waited till they'd been
built before ordering them to be demolished. Though Ford humiliated
Edsel, he was devastated when his son died from cancer in 1943, aged
only 49. The sparkle vanished from his eyes and he hurtled towards
senility. He briefly became president of the Ford Motor Company once
more, but couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing or why.
By now, Ford was unquestionably the world's greatest industrialist:
he'd made a personal fortune of over $1 billion. But he was
deteriorating into what his doctor described as "a pleasant
vegetable" and died after a massive stroke in 1947, aged 83.
Photo: Ford's rivals included the British Austin company. This is a 1930s Austin 10 Super Tourer.
Car planet
Chariots thrived in the ancient Mediterranean and Middle-East.
Steam-power was a product of 18th-century Britain.
In the 19th century, French and German engineers built the first petrol cars. At the start of the 20th century Henry Ford,
an American, made simple cars people could afford. Ever since then, the miracle
of the motor car has spread around the world... and changed the face of our planet.
People's wagon: 1940s: Germany
German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) gave Henry Ford a medal for
making cars affordable. Inspired by the Model-T Ford, Hitler asked German
auto-maker Dr Ferdinard Porsche to develop a simple people's car or
"Volks Wagen" called the KDF (Kraft durch Freude or
Strength through Joy). Renamed the Beetle, it sold over 20 million worldwide
and was one of the most popular cars of the 20th century.
Photo: Small, basic cars like this Austin Mini, popular in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s, owed much to pioneering, affordable cars like the Model T-Ford and Volkswagen Beetle.
Status symbols: 1950s/1960s: America
Ford wanted to keep cars simple to keep them cheap. But his
"any colour so long as it's black" message fell out of favour:
people wanted comfort and style. In the 1930s, cars became sleek,
glamorous, and "streamlined"; inside, they boasted
luxuries like automatic gears and window defrosters. The end of World War II
brought cars inspired by planes. Swaggering "gas
guzzlers" were given tail fins like jet fighters—and burned almost as much
fuel!
Paving the way: 1930s-1950s: Europe and America
Many countries launched huge roadbuilding schemes in the mid-20th
century. Hitler helped to pioneer Germany's high-speed Autobahns
in the 1930s, while his Italian pal Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
greatly expanded the Italian network of autostrade. Britain didn't start building motorways
until the 1950s, when America also reorganized its major roads into a simple numbered
network called the Interstate Highway System.
Cuban Classics: 1950s: Cuba
Cuba has been cut-off from the United States since the Cuban
revolution of 1959, so many Cubans still drive round in classic cars
from the late 1950s. It's hard to buy new cars or spares for old ones!
Photo: A classic cuban car. Photo by Matthias Schack,
published on Flickr
in 2008 under a Creative Commons licence. Lots more like this in the Flickr Cuban Cars pool.
Trabi trials (1950s-1980s): East Germany
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, eastern Europeans zipped
around in 3 million ugly little cars called Trabants (or
"Trabis"). They were cheap and cheerful—even cool in some ways, with
recycled plastic body parts that lasted nearly 30 years. But their engines
chugged like mowers and smoke belched from their exhausts. When
communism collapsed, people drove their Trabants to the scrap heap
at top speed. Only to find the plastic bits couldn't be recycled.
Big Sheik Out: 1970s: Middle East
In 1973, oil-rich states in the Middle East began to restrict
exports—turning off the tap that supplied the world with oil.
There were sharp hikes in fuel prices and queues of cars snaking
from gas stations were a familiar sight.
Sugar cars: 1970s- : Brazil
When the 1973 oil crisis hit home, the Brazilian government launched
a major project to run the country's cars on ethanol made from sugar
beet. Almost 30,000 filling stations in Brazil now sell ethanol,
which supplies a fifth of the country's fuel.
First robot carmaker: 1961: Ewing, New Jersey, USA
Henry Ford pioneered automation, but General Motoros took it a
quantum leap further in 1961. That's when the first-ever car-making
robot started building car bodies at the GM plant in Ewing New
Jersey.
Photo: A modern car-welding robot at Think Tank, the museum of science in Birmingham, England.
Big in Japan: 1970s-1980s: Japan
American and European car firms dominated car production till the
1970s. Then Japanese upstarts such as Nissan, Honda, Mazda, and Toyota began to undercut
them by exporting cheaply made cars to the West. For a time,
countries like the United States and Britain fought off these
imports. So the Japanese went further and began exporting their
factories instead. Honda became the first Japanese maker to open
plants in the United States and Canada in the early 1980s.
Compete or cooperate? California, USA: 2000s-
Car makers used to compete; now they cooperate. In the world of
"globalization", big companies and their brands operate beyond
national borders. New cars are expensive to design so makers in
different countries work together to reduce costs. A Renault made in
France might use exactly the same chassis, engine, or bodywork as a
Nissan made in Japan. Another example of globalization is when a car
plant in one country builds vehicles for more than one maker. Toyota
and General Motors jointly run a plant like this in Fremont,
California making parts for Toyotas, Pontiacs, and Chevrolets.
Car-making memories: UK: 2000s-
Britain's car industry once employed over a million people and was
the world's second-biggest producer after the United States. Today,
the only big car plants left in Britain are run by Japanese firms
and the once great names of British motoring—Jaguar, Rolls
Royce, Bentley, and Aston Martin—are foreign-owned too.
Dream cars: China: 2000-
The Chinese are bicycle crazy: there are twice as many cycles in China
as people in the United States. But all that could soon change. Car
makers are eagerly turning their eyes to China, the world's
fastest-growing car market, where sales are growing at 80 per cent a
year. The country's biggest car maker, Shanghai Automotive, has
already formed powerful alliances with big western firms including
Fiat, General Motors, and Volkswagen.
