subject: History Of Cars [print this page] It's absolutely impossible to think of a world without cars. Safely and quickly they take us wherever we need to go, making our world reliant upon them. In fact, today owning a car is no longer a luxury but becoming quite a necessity. But when did the first car appear? Who is the inventor of the automobile?
Like many other modern inventions, the invention of the car did not occur on a single day by any single individual. Indeed, the evolution of the car happened worldwide over a period of time.
The first working steam-powered vehicle was invented in 1672 by Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China. However, Verbiests car was too small to carry a driver or passengers since it was merely a toy that he built for the Chinese Emperor.
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot of France made a steam-driven artillery tractor in the late-18th century but the model was deemed impractical and the idea was forgotten. The idea was later picked up by William Murdoch of Great Britain who, in 1784 in Redruth, built a steam carriage. The notion was later expanded by Richard Trevithick who drove a full-sized vehicle in 1801 on the roads of Camborne.
However, because the earliest steam-powered vehicles were very heavy, impractical and could only run on flat surfaces, they did not become popular until later. In order to accommodate such heavy vehicles, roads made from iron rails were constructed over the next 125 years. These bulky automobiles only got larger and heavier over time to the point where they could even pull trains! These older, heavier versions were gradually replaced with smaller models more like what we see today.
It's commonly believed that Henry Ford invented the automobile. What he actually did was to perfect the assembly-line technique. This dramatically lowered the cost of automobiles and made them available to everyone. With the advent of more affordable cars, Western society was changed and cars were no longer limited to the rich.
