Cars
It is claimed that the very first steam powered vehicle was built in or around 1672 by Ferdinand Verbiest for the Chinese Emperor. It was a small scale design that was unable to carry a person.
Some credit Cugnot for building the first self propelled automobile around 1769, by adapting a horse drawn vehicle. However many dispute this by claiming that Cugnot’s three wheeler ever ran. Richard Trevithick built and demonstrated a road locomotive in 1801, which is believed by many to be the first demonstration of a steam powered road vehicle, but it was unable to maintain sufficient steam pressure for any length of time which proved unpractical.
A Swiss inventor by the Name of Francois Isaac de Rivaz, designed the first internal combustion engine in 1806. The design was not successful, as was the case with others designed by Samuel Brown and Etienne Lenoir. November 1881 saw Gustave Trouve demonstrate a three wheeled automobile powered by electricity at the International Exhibition of Electricity in Pars.
Many German engineers including Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Siegfried Marcus were working on the problem of the IC engine at about the same time, it is Karl Benz who is generally acknowledged as the inventor of the modern automobile.
An automobile powered by his own four stroke engine was built in Germany in 1885, and was granted a patent the following year under his major company Benz & Cie.
The large scale production line manufacturing of affordable cars was debuted by Oldsmobile in 1902, and the concept was expanding by Henry Ford in 1914.
