Cars are amazing! And one of the most amazing things about them is that no-one invented them—no single person, that is. There was no scribbling on
the back of an envelope, no lightning flash of inspiration, and no-one ran down the street crying "Eureka". All the
different parts—the engine, the wheels, the gears, and all the fiddly bits like the windscreen wipers—somehow came together, very gradually, over a period of about five and a half thousand years. How did it
happen? Let's take a closer look!
Photo: Museums like Wheels of Yesteryear, pictured here, teach us that the history of cars has evolved through shifts in fashion and culture and as well as improvements in technology. Photograph courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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.
People tended to stay put, living more locally than they 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.
Photo: Beasts of burden: animals were the original engines.
Native Americans of the Blackfoot Confederacy walk alongside a travois: two long poles crossed at the front to
make a dragging frame that can carry heavy loads. Photo
courtesy of US Library of Congress.
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: 1) The first wheels were made of solid wood.
This is a primitive solid wheel on a cart in Greece. Photo by H.C. White Co., Publishers, 1903,
courtesy of US Library of Congress. 2) By the early 20th century, car wheels had spokes similar to bicycle wheels, which make them lighter and easier to turn. Photo of a 1909 Sterling Model K automobile
courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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 teeth around the edge that lock and 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.
Sponsored links
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 boiler (a sort of gigantic coal-fired kettle) squirted into
the space in the cylinder underneath the piston.
Then cold water was squirted in to make the steam condense,
creating a partial vacuum directly under the piston.
Since the air pressure in the space above the piston was now greater
than that in the space beneath it, the piston moved down.
When the vacuum was released, the piston rose back up again.
The rising and falling piston operated a pump that slowly sucked the
water from the mine.
Machines like this were originally called fire engines—they were, after all, powered by
burning coal—though they soon became known as steam engines when
people realized that controlling steam was the key to making them work more efficiently.
One of those people was a Scotsman named James Watt (1736–1819).
In 1764, Watt redesigned Newcomen's engine so it was both 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.
Large Watt engines soon found their way into factories, where they 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 still too big and heavy to use in vehicles,
but that didn't stop people trying. In 1769,
Frenchman Nicholas Joseph Cugnot (1725–1804) used steam-engine
technology to make a lumbering, three-wheeled tractor for pulling
heavy army cannons. Many people consider this the world's first car, but it was
incredibly primitive by today's standards. 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.
Artwork: A side view of Nicholas Joseph Cugnot's steam tractor. The
boiler is at the front. Illustration from
Useful Information for Railway Men by W.G. Hamilton, Van Nostrand, 1869.
Steam engines were soon finding 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.
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, though it was mostly a publicity stunt
and never a truly credible steam vehicle.
[1]
Artwork: The Oruktor Amphibolos, built by Oliver Evans, could drive along on four wheels or steam down the river using its rear-mounted paddle. Note how the steam engine at the front uses a pulley to power both the front
and rear axles, making this a very early example of four-wheel drive. Artwork from The Mechanic magazine, July 1834, courtesy of
US Library of Congress.
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, until a clever bunch of scientists showed up.
Artwork: Goldsworthy Gurney's steam carriage, as illustrated in
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Volume 10, No. 287, 1827: "The vehicle resembles the ordinary stage-coaches, but is rather larger and higher. Coke or charcoal are to form the fuel, by which means smoke will be avoided; the flues will be above the level of the seated passenger, and it is calculated that the motion of the carriage will always disperse the heated rarefied air from the flues."
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".
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.
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
Photo: Nicolas Sadi Carnot, aged 17.
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? Actually, a great deal! It was Carnot who inspired Rudolf Diesel to
invent his engine, for example, and his theory of how engines work
remains the centerpiece of thermodynamics (the scientific study of heat).
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.
Artwork: One of Lenoir's engines. This one ran on coal gas
and was capable of 3 horsepower. Once you can build an engine like this,
you're halfway to making a car! The cylinder and piston are on the left (blue), the
flywheel
is on the right, and the crank (yellow) connects them together. The engine's speed is regulated by a centrifugal governor (red). I assume the purple thing at the back is the gas tank. Illustration from "The Gas and Oil Engine" by Dugald Clerk. New York, J. Wiley & Sons, 1896,
courtesy of US Library of Congress.
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. Gasoline (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 traveling 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 gasoline 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 gasoline engine of his own, he fixed it to a
three-wheeled carriage and made the world's first practical
gas-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 drug stores (chemist's shops), because gas
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.
Artwork: Thanks to his wife's test drive, Karl Benz added gears to his car to make it easier to drive up hills. Here's a drawing from a patent he filed showing how they worked: the gasoline engine (blue) powers a piston (pink)
and flywheel (green), which drives the gears (red) that power the large rear wheels (brown).
Artwork from US Patent 386,798: Driving gear for velocipedes by Karl Benz, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.
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 gasoline 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
honor 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.
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
gasoline 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
traveling 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.
Photo: Karl Benz's car. Photo courtesy of
The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America, US Library of Congress.
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 tires 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
catalog 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
shriveled 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 tires today by a cooking process now
known as vulcanization.
The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford
“It was not at all my idea to make cars in any such petty fashion.”
Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 1922
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.
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.
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.
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 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 color, 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".
How the horse was "done"
"I felt perfectly certain that horses, considering all the
bother of attending them and the expense of feeding, did not earn their keep."
—Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 1922.
From horse to car in six steps and about 5000 years...
Wild horse: The horse's stomach is its fuel tank and it "burns"
food to make power. "Four-leg drive" makes this the perfect, all-terrain vehicle, with a top speed of ~90 km/h (60 mph).
Horse and cart (~2500 BCE): Dragging a cart with heavy, solid wheels slows the horse down to a
measly 6 km/h (4 mph)—brisk human walking speed. The wheels mean the cart can carry huge loads over long distances. It's just a shame
there are no roads.
Roman chariot (100BCE-476CE): With four horses and two slick, spoked wheels, a racing chariot has
more horsepower, less weight, and less friction to slow it down. It can reach speeds of 60 km/h (40 mph) But it can't carry much
shopping.
Phaeton (~1800-1900): The phaeton (a sporty, four-wheel carriage) sacrifices a bit of speed
for comfort: it has suspension under the wheels to smooth the ride.
The "dashboard" protects the passengers from stones and
muck the horses kick back as they dash along. It has a top speed of 16 km/h
(10 mph)
Ford's Quadricyle (1896):
Ford's first car is not so much a "horseless carriage"
as a horse crossed with a carriage: it has its own gasoline engine
and fuel tank and four bicycle wheels instead of four legs. Its top
speed of 32 km/h (20 mph) is only a third of a horse's.
Model T Ford (1908): Ford's Model-T combines speed, practicality, and simplicity. Its
20-horsepower gasoline engine can race to speeds of 72 km/h (45 mph)—still slower than a galloping horse. The only thing it can't
do is jump fences.
Photo: Henry Ford's mass-produced cars soon became ubiquitous. This Ford Model Y dates from 1933. Immaculately preserved, it was photographed in 2009—at the sprightly age of 76!
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: A Ford Model T. Photo courtesy of
Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive US Library of Congress.
River Rouge
Photo: Inside one of the many River Rouge buildings in 1941.
Photo (believed to be in the public domain) by Alfred T. Palmer,
Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information
courtesy of US Library of Congress.
Ford's most ambitious project was his sprawling River Rouge car
plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Production of Model T parts switched
here in 1919, though the car was still put together at Highland
Park. With dozens of enormous buildings spread across a vast area,
River Rouge was more like a city for making cars than a traditional
assembly plant.
The idea was to make cars more cheaply than ever
before by taking in the most basic raw materials at one end and
churning out millions of finished vehicles at the other. Giant
barges ferried coal to the Rouge from Ford's own mines down the
river. Elsewhere on the site, there was a steelworks, a glassworks,
a cement works, a body-making plant, a sawmill, and a rubber-making
plant. River Rouge even had its own hospital, police force, and a
steam-electric power station big enough to light a city. All this
meant it could produce one car every 49 seconds.
River Rouge Facts
93 separate buildings.
81,000 people employed.
120 miles of assembly line conveyors.
100 miles of private railroad track and 16 trains.
Total size: 2000 acres (an area the size of 1000 British soccer pitches or 1500 American football fields).
15,767,708 square feet of factory floors and 3500 mops used each month to keep them clean.
Total cost: $268,991,592.07—equivalent to about £1.5 billion today!
Photo: An outside view of Ford's River Rouge plant in 1941. Photo
by John Vachon, U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information,
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. Yet 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
Photo: The radiator of a Ford Edsel, one of Henry Ford's huge commercial flops.
Photo courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive US Library of Congress.
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.
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 gasoline 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: An unusual two-tone VW Beetle restored to its original glory.
Status symbols: 1950s–1960s: America
Ford wanted to keep cars simple to keep them cheap. But his
"any color so long as it's black" message fell out of favor:
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!
Photo: The aircraft-inspired tail lights and fins on a mid-century Cadillac.
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith courtesy of The Carol M. Highsmith Archive,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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 row of classic American cars in Havana, Cuba. Photograph courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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 Motors 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–
Not so long ago, the Chinese were famously bike crazy: there were twice as many cycles in China
as people in the United States. Back in 2000, almost four in ten of Beijing's commuters cycled to work; today,
that figure is closer to one in ten.
For the last few years, most car makers have been eagerly turning their eyes to China,
and it's easy to see why.
The world's fastest-growing car market is seeing sales increases of something like 80 per cent a
year. But the Chinese aren't just making cars for themselves. According to the
International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, US car production declined by almost a half between 1999 and 2017;
in China, it increased something like 40 times.
That's partly due to higher rates of car ownership in Asia, but it's
also because China is making cars for the rest of the world.
The country's biggest car maker, Shanghai Automotive, has
formed powerful alliances with big western firms including
Fiat, General Motors, and Volkswagen.
Self-driving cars: California: 2000–
Who knows if we'll even be driving cars in the future? Companies like Google are now
busily developing cars with onboard sensors (like radar and
lidar) that can navigate their way
around the world while the people inside sit back and enjoy the view.
Part robot, part computer, part old-fashioned automobile, these hybrid
machines are likely to prove far safer and much more environmentally
friendly than cars driven by careless, fallible humans.
Electric cars: 2010s–
Despite what you might think, electric vehicles are actually older than gasoline-driven
ones, but it's taken well over a century for them to catch on properly.
Are the days of petrol and diesel finally numbered? Find out more
in our main article about electric cars.
Car crazy!
Photo: Crazy for cars... or plain car crazy?
The Berwyn car spindle, Berwyn, Illinois was a 50-foot spike with eight cars impaled on it.
Photograph courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
There's really nowhere better to learn about car history than at a car museum. Here are a few to check out. If you know of any
other good ones, please let me know and I'll add them in here.
Car: The Definitive Visual History of the Automobile. Dorling Kindersley, 2022. A coffee table look at car history, including huge closeup photos of classic car engines and the stories of great car marques (brands).
Classic American Cars by Quentin Willson. DK, 1997. An illustrated look at some of the greatest US cars of all time.
Books for younger readers
General
Car Crazy by Carron Brown. Dorling Kindersley, 2012/2014. A wide-ranging but fairly basic look at the world of cars, for ages 7–10.
Car Science by Richard Hammond. Dorling Kindersley, 2008. A great introduction to the science that powers cars—including, engines, gears, hydraulics, and aerodynamics. Ages 9–12.
Eyewitness Car by Richard Sutton. Dorling Kindersley, 2005. A general introduction to car science, technology, and history for ages 9–12 (and perhaps a bit beyond).
How Cars Work by Tom Newton. Black Apple Press, 1999. Each page of this illustrated book explains one major part of a car. Good for teenagers and adults.
History
Time for Kids: Henry Ford by Dina El Nabli. HarperCollins, 2008. A readable, well-illustrated, 50-page biography for younger readers aged 7–9.
Cars of the World by J.D. Scheel. Methuen, 1963/1971. A lovely illustrated history that's well worth tracking down in secondhand book stores. Each chapter charts the development of cars in a different country, ranging (alphabetically) from Austria to the United States.
↑ Evans' vehicle ran for several days around the streets of Philadelphia and he collected a voluntary donation of 25 cents from spectators.
Even so, Kathleen Simonton fairly describes it as "more of a publicity stunt than a breathrough
in steam-powered vehicles..."
See Journal of the Franklin Institute, July 1886, p.10 and "Amphibious Steam Vehicle" by Kathleen Simonton in
Technical Innovation in American History: An Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, ABC-Clio, 2019, Volume 1, p.80.
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