Automotive History
Internal-Combustion Inventors
Lenoir and Marcus had shown the feasibility of the internal-combustion
engines, but both lacked faith in their own enterprises and abandoned their
efforts. Closest to the mark in the judgment of historians is another pair
of inventors who had faith in the future of the motorcar as well as in
themselves. They worked doggedly (and unbeknownst to each other) to find
the missing pieces of a puzzle that had been plaguing automotive inventors
through the years: how to propel the horseless carriage.
Carl Freidrich Benz and Gottlich Wilhelm Daimler worked separately (and
at almost the same moment) in Germany; each designing and building the
world's first commercially successful cars. These are, for all intents
and purposes, the direct linear antecedents of the modern automobile.
Benz's first creation was not very impressive, either in design nor
in initial road test. It was a fragile, carriage-like three-wheeler with
tubular framework, mounted on a Benz-designed, one-horsepower, one-cylinder
engine. The engine was a refinement of the four-stroke engine designed
by Nikolaus Otto (another German), who had refined his from Lenoir's two-stroke
engine. Even though Benz's creation was awkward and frail, it incorporated
some essential elements that would characterize the modern vehicle: electrical
ignition, differential, mechanical valves, carburetor, engine cooling system,
oil and grease cups for lubrication, and a braking system. He obtained
a patent on a "carriage with gasoline engine" in 1886.
About seventy-five miles from Carl Benz, Daimler worked diligently to
design a better internal-combustion engine. He was satisfied that he had
succeeded in 1833, when he took out a patent on what he believed was a
more efficient, four-stroke, gasoline-fueled engine. He first mounted his
engine on a sturdy bicycle, a two-wheeler, which ran satisfactorily on
its test run in 1885. This was the prototype of the modern motorcycle.
In 1887, Daimler, encouraged by this success and by experience, installed
his engine in a four-wheeled, two-passenger vehicle. The engine had only
a few more horsepower than Benz's, but it was lighter and ran at a much
higher speed - 900 rpm as compared to Benz's 300 rpm. It was the first
example of a high-speed, internal- combustion engine.
Daimler and Benz argued heatedly concerning each other's claim to fame
and prestige. Daimler insisted that he had successfully tested his engine
on a bicycle before Benz had patented his tricycle and had, in any case,
been the first to patent a four-wheeled car. Benz conceded that Daimler
invented the motorcycle, but he insisted his tricycle was the first motorcar.
These claims are still argued to this day by people who care; historians
give both men a lot of credit: Daimler for his high-speed engine; Benz
for the features of water cooling, electric ignition and differential gears.
Benz and Daimler continued separately and competitively, to develop improved
engines and refined vehicles to put them in. When Gottlich died in 1900,
his company removed his name from the car he had created and affixed "Mercedes,"
for Mercedes Jellinck, the daughter of an influential distributor who lived
in France. In 1926, when Carl Benz was 82 (he lived three more years),
the companies merged into one firm. These two inventive giants, who worked
so hard and lived less than seventy-five miles apart, never met one another,
but they poised the world for entry into the Automobile Age. Just as the
19th-century was making its way into the 20th, the world was little inclined
to be led in the direction of automobiles - except for those who had money
enough to indulge their fancies, and in France, where motorcar production
was beginning to assume some significant economical measures.
The wide boulevards of Paris, and the fine paved roads radiating out
of the French capital, were ideal settings for rich sportsmen to show off
their noisy toys. By 1895, there were so many self-propelled vehicles puttering
around the city that the French Academy coined a new word to the French
language to describe them. The word was "automobile."
One of the first vehicles to be officially designated an automobile
was a car which is now considered to be the real prototype of modern cars.
It was a Daimler-powered vehicle built in 1892 by the Parisian carriage-making
firm, Panhard and Levassor. The "Panhard" marked the appearance of the
automobile's classic design: engine in front, supplying power to a gearbox
behind it; gearbox connected by chain drive to the rear drive wheels. It
had four forward speeds and a reverse, and an 1894 model made headlines
when it covered a 750-mile distance from Paris to Rouen in forty-eight
hours at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour.
