An
automobile powered by the Otto gasoline engine was invented in Germany
by Karl Benz in 1885. Benz was granted a patent dated 29 January 1886
in Mannheim for that automobile. Even though Benz is credited with the
invention of the modern automobile, several other German engineers
worked on building automobiles at the same time. In 1886, Gottlieb
Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in Stuttgart patented the first motor bike,
built and tested in 1885, and in 1886 they built a converted
horse-drawn stagecoach. In 1870, German-Austrian inventor Siegfried
Marcus assembled a motorized handcart, though Marcus' vehicle did not
go beyond the experimental stage.
Internal combustion engine powered vehicles
Animation of a 4-stroke overhead-cam internal combustion engine
Enlarge
Animation of a 4-stroke overhead-cam internal combustion engine
In
1806 François Isaac de Rivaz, a Swiss, designed the first internal
combustion engine (sometimes abbreviated "ICE" today). He subsequently
used it to develop the world's first vehicle to run on such an engine
that used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to generate energy. The
design was not very successful, as was the case with the British
inventor, Samuel Brown, and the American inventor, Samuel Morey, who
produced vehicles powered by clumsy internal combustion engines about
1826.
Etienne Lenoir produced the first successful stationary
internal combustion engine in 1860, and within a few years, about four
hundred were in operation in Paris. About 1863, Lenoir installed his
engine in a vehicle. It seems to have been powered by city lighting-gas
in bottles, and was said by Lenoir to have "travelled more slowly than
a man could walk, with breakdowns being frequent." Lenoir, in his
patent of 1860, included the provision of a carburettor, so liquid fuel
could be substituted for gas, particularly for mobile purposes in
vehicles. Lenoir is said to have tested liquid fuel, such as alcohol,
in his stationary engines; but it does not appear that he used them in
his own vehicle. If he did, he most certainly did not use gasoline, as
this was not well-known and was considered a waste product.
The
next innovation occurred in the late 1860s, with Siegfried Marcus, a
German working in Vienna, Austria. He developed the idea of using
gasoline as a fuel in a two-stroke internal combustion engine. In 1870,
using a simple handcart, he built a crude vehicle with no seats,
steering, or brakes, but it was remarkable for one reason: it was the
world's first vehicle using an internal combustion engine fueled by
gasoline. It was tested in Vienna in September of 1870 and put aside.
In 1888 or 1889, he built a second automobile, this one with seats,
brakes, and steering, and included a four-stroke engine of his own
design. That design may have been tested in 1890. Although he held
patents for many inventions, he never applied for patents for either
design in this category.
The four-stroke engine already had been
documented and a patent was applied for in 1862 by the Frenchman Beau
de Rochas in a long-winded and rambling pamphlet. He printed about
three hundred copies of his pamphlet and they were distributed in
Paris, but nothing came of this, with the patent application expiring
soon afterward and the pamphlet disappearing into obscurity.
Most
historians agree that Nikolaus Otto of Germany built the world's first
four-stroke engine although his patent was voided.[citation needed] He
knew nothing of Beau de Rochas's patent or idea, and invented the
concept independently. In fact, he began thinking about the concept in
1861, but abandoned it until the mid-1870s.
In 1883, Edouard
Delamare-Deboutteville and Leon Malandin of France installed an
internal combustion engine powered by a tank of city gas on a tricycle.
As they tested the vehicle, the tank hose came loose, resulting in an
explosion. In 1884, Delamare-Deboutteville and Malandin built and
patented a second vehicle. This one consisted of two four-stroke,
liquid-fueled engines mounted on an old four-wheeled horse cart. The
patent, and presumably the vehicle, contained many innovations, some of
which would not be used for decades. However, during the vehicle's
first test, the frame broke apart, the vehicle literally "shaking
itself to pieces," in Malandin's own words. No more vehicles were built
by the two men. Their venture went completely unnoticed and their
patent unexploited. Knowledge of the vehicles and their experiments was
obscured until years later.
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