Ford Introduces The Flathead V8 Engine
As with the new Model A, Henry Ford shut down all other production operations to work on this innovative project. At great effort and expense, the company engineered a way to cast the first commercially successful V8 engine.
The flathead was a hit. It was affordable, versatile, and introduced just as the American market was becoming fascinated with ever-more powerful engines. It remained in production for over 22 years. To this day the flathead remains extremely popular with hot rodders.
What Was The First Car A Quick History Of The Automobile For Young People
Several Italians recorded designs for wind driven vehicles. The first was Guido da Vigevano in 1335. It was a windmill type drive to gears and thus to wheels. Vaturio designed a similar vehicle which was also never built. Later Leonardo da Vinci designed a clockwork driven tricycle with tiller steering and a differential mechanism between the rear wheels.
The first vehicle to move under its own power for which there is a record was designed by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot and constructed by M. Brezin in 1769. A replica of this vehicle is on display at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in Paris. I believe that the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D. C. also has a large scale model. A second unit was built in 1770 which weighed 8000 pounds and had a top speed on 2 miles per hour and on the cobble stone streets of Paris this was probably as fast as anyone wanted to go it. The picture shows the first model on its first drive around Paris were it hit and knocked down a stone wall. It also had a tendency to tip over frontward unless it was counterweighted with a canon in the rear. the purpose of the vehicle was to haul canons around town.
In 1876, Nokolaus Otto patented the Otto cycle engine, de Rochas had neglected to do so, and this later became the basis for Daimler and Benz breaking the Otto patent by claiming prior art from de Rochas.
What Is The Unit For Speed
The unit for speed is distance over time, as it is defined as the amount of time it takes an object to cover a particular distance. The base, or SI, unit is metres per second, but this is not very practical in everyday life. You are likely more familiar with units such as kilometres per hour, miles per hour and knots. Any distance over time is a speed unit, so other units of speed include nanometres per fortnight, Boeing 787s per solar year, or bananas per Friedman.
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Henry Ford’s Production Line
In a world defined by economic efficiency, the coming of the production line in 1913 had a profound effect.
Before the production line, a Model T could be produced using 12.5 hours of labour. On a production line, a Model T could be produced using 93 minutes of manpower, reducing the cost of labour by 87.6 percent.
In 1910, a Model T Ford Runabout cost $900. In 1916, the same car sold for $350. By the middle 1920s, the price was $260.
Ford’s price advantage meant its top selling vehicle could be offered at such a price that it drove adoption by the masses, enabling affordable personal transportation to the common man for the second time, though in a far faster and more comfortable form than the bicycle or the horse drawn carriage. Fifteen million Model T Fords would be sold in the next 20 years.
This revolutionary production technique meant that Ford grew incredibly quickly. At one stage it had produced more than half the cars in the world. Moves such as doubling the pay of his workers helped Henry Ford find a special place in modern folklore as a benevolent industrialist.
What’s more, this quantum leap in technology drove America to automotive dominance globally with mass automobile production quickly reshaping not just the automotive industry but the finance, insurance, oil, tire, dealership networks, spare part supply chains and other industries around it.
The coming of the automobile industry effectively supercharged the American economy.
work And Kinetic Energy
Some people are still not convinced. They say a baseball cannotacquire kinetic energy unless someone transfers energy to it bypushing on it, i.e. by doing work on it. There& #X2019 s even a theorem aboutthis, called the “Work / Kinetic Energy” theorem.
Well, what& #X2019 s true for baseballs isn& #X2019 t necessarily true for cars. Ifyou look at what the Work/KE theorem actually says , you will find that it applies only topoint particles. It does not generally apply to objects that haveinternal structure. And it absolutely certainly does not apply toobjects that have on-board energy conversion machinery!
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Jeantaud Duc Profilee Ev
The battle was now all consuming for both Jeantaud and Jenatzy, and on 4 March 1899, six weeks after Jenatzy’s record, the Electric Count rolled out a new car dubbed the “Jeantaud Duc Profilée,” which included the first notion of aerodynamic efficiency in an automobile. The drag coefficient was no doubt reduced with the greatest gain coming from a much smaller frontal area and the Count took the record back with a run of 92.7 km/h .
Internal Combustion Engine: The Heart Of The Automobile
An internal combustion engine is an engine that uses the explosive combustion of fuel to push a piston within a cylinder the piston’s movement turns a crankshaft that then turns the car wheels via a chain or a drive shaft. The different types of fuel commonly used for car combustion engines are gasoline , diesel, and kerosene.
A brief outline of the history of the internal combustion engine includes the following highlights:
Engine design and car design were integral activities, almost all of the engine designers mentioned above also designed cars, and a few went on to become major manufacturers of automobiles. All of these inventors and more made notable improvements in the evolution of the internal combustion vehicles.
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Henry Ford Ii Becomes President Of Ford Motor Company
The son of Edsel and the grandson of Henry Ford, Henry Ford II, served as president from 1945 to 1960 and as chairman and CEO from 1960 to 1979. When Henry II took over, the company and its bookkeeping practices were in disarray. With the help of ten former U.S. Army Air Force officers nicknamed the Whiz Kids, Henry II transformed the organization into a disciplined company with modern management systems prepared for the global challenges of the post-war world.
Is Velocity The Same As Speed
Velocity and speed are very nearly the same – in fact the only difference between the two is that velocity is speed with direction. Speed is what is known as a scalar quantity, meaning that it can be described by a single number . It is also the magnitude of velocity. Velocity, a vector quality, must have both the magnitude and direction specified, e.g. travelling 90 mph south east.
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Hennessey Venom Gt: 270 Mph
On Valentines Day in 2014, John Hennessey of Hennessey Performance declared an end to his feud with Bugatti. After years of sparring, the American car manufacturer saw his Venom GT seize the World Record for Fastest Car on NASAs Kennedy Space Centers runway.
The car took two full years to engineer and develop. 29 were made the manufacturer has only let them go for approximately 1.2 million apiece.
The supercar itself is gorgeous, with sinuous curves and a sleek body. Featuring an ultra-light carbon-fibre chassis, the Venom GT almost reads feline, as if its a black panther poised to leap forward at any second.
And leap, it does: The Venom GT reached a top speed of a then-unprecedented 270mph or 434 km/h. While performing its World Record tests, it achieved an acceleration of 0-100km/h or 0-60 mph in 3.05 seconds.
Website: www.hennesseyspecialvehicles.com
Trains Owned The Luxury Travel Market
Trains owned the market for luxury long-distance land travel at this time as the only alternative was the horse-drawn carriage over rough roads, with river boats and steam ships offering painless long-distance travel to only the most affluent.
Steam trains were still considerably faster than any other land vehicle. In 1891, at a time when the motor car was struggling to become a commercial reality, the Empire State Express covered the 436 miles from New York to Buffalo in 7 hours 6 minutes, averaging 61.4 mph , with a top speed of 82 mph .
In 1893 the same company’s latest 4-4-0 steam locomotive was capable of 100 mph. So by the time of the first record attempts were made by automobiles, they were a long way behind the steam train.
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What About Tinkerers And Inventors
Further, Im going to distinguish between a tinkerer who happened to build something vaguely car-like and the founding of the first car company. To qualify, this needs to be a person or persons, ideally operating as some sort of legal entity, with commercial ambition. And while they dont necessarily need to have been successful in the long or even medium term, they do need to have at least produced something other than debt and paperwork for it to count for the purposes of this research.
This is at least partly out of convenience we need some sort of surviving record of the effort for it to even show up on the modern radar, and thats a lot more likely to exist for an actual company than for some independent, self-funded futurist/crackpot working in a shed.
Further, there were a number of visionary attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to raise money for automotive projects that were simply too far ahead of their time to go anywhere. As early as 1804, Oliver Evans attempted to establish what he called the Experiment Company to raise funds for steam wagon construction but failed to obtain the capital . So, they dont count here.
Mercer Type 35r Raceabout
1910 | United States
The American Mercer 35R Raceabout was a sportscar sold between 1910 and 1914, with a string of major victories in American racing from 1911 onwards. The 35R Raceabout sold for US$2,250 at that time, the price of a modest home. It was not only very expensive, but a genuine production sportscar with a powerful 300 cubic inch T-head four-cylinder engine producing 58 hp at 1,900 rpm. The Raceabout’s 4,800 cc, 4-cylinder Raceabout won five of the six 1911 races it was entered in, losing only the first Indianapolis 500. Many racing victories followed and the Raceabout became one of the premier racing thoroughbreds of the era.
RMSotheby’s sold a 1911 Mercer Type 35R Raceabout for $2,530,000 at Monterey in 2014, producing the above video to promote the sale, which gives a real feel for what the car was like. Hemmings estimates there are between 30 and 35 T-head Mercer Raceabouts extant, validating the production status of the Raceabout, which was unquestionably a sportscar.
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How Fast Was The First Car To Ever Receive A Speeding Ticket Going
Probably a bit slower than you think.
In 1896, this Arnold Benz Motor Carriage was the first car to ever receive a speeding ticket. Careering down Paddock Green in Kent at a whopping 8 mph, the four-wheeler’s owner, Walter Arnold was stopped and pulled over by a copper on a bicycle. He was later convicted of travelling at four times the speed limit yes, the speed limit at the time was 2 mph – and received a fine of one shilling and costs for this trouble. That’s the equivalent of around 20 GBP today.
Drivers of ICE-powered vehicles were also required to be led by a man on foot waving a red flag at all times and our boy racer Walter was speeding all alone. Later that same year, the speed limit was raised to 14 mph and the need for a red flag bear abolished. To celebrate, the Emancipation Run was held, where cars raced from London to Brighton, and was won by Arnold who earned himself a gold medal. The run still exists today in the form of the Royal Automobile Club’s annual Veteran Car Run where participants cruise down from the capital to the coast in pre-1905 cars.
The car pictured here is the exact car Arnold received his ticket in, and will be on display at the Concours of Elegance 2017 this September at Hampton Court Palace alongside other speed demons of their time including the Harrods-livered McLaren F1 GTR and Le Mans-winning Jaguar XJR-9.
The World’s Fastest Cars From 1894 To 1914
Many very fast road cars were built from 1910 onwards, but not necessarily in large quantities, and whereas the 1945-2016 section of this history of the world’s fastest cars had references to specific speeds, this part will rely more on ballpark figures and disparate data points including average speeds and distance records to trace the early development of the fastest road cars.
It’s the only data available, and top speed was more theoretical then than it is now in a land where 99 percent of the roads were unpaved. Durability was the most important variable in this harsh climate, and the fastest cars of yesteryear had to have “good bones” to cope with the inevitable potholes along the way.
To put the rise of the motor car in perspective, we’ve also made occasional reference to other vehicles such as trains, planes and motorcycles that held speed records during the era.
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How To Give An Electric Golf Cart More Torque
How do you get more torque from electrical golf carts? The first thing you need to understand is what voltage is used for. Voltage is equivalent to speed and Amperage, which together is known as torque.
If youre aiming to get more speed from your club car or other electric golf cart, its mandatory to increase the motor RPM .
Here are two methods of increasing motor RPM:
- Select a motor with the highest rated RPM so you can leave your voltage alone.
- Another option is to provide the current engine with extra voltage. It helps you to keep the present motor and add-on extra voltage, to enhance the top speed.
I would advise against artificially increasing voltage this is likely to damage the motor in the long run. Only electronic experts should attempt increasing the volts and even then its still not advised.
How The Horse Was Done
“I felt perfectly certain that horses, considering all thebother 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…
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What Is The Most Economical Driving Speed
While the most economical driving speed changes with every vehicle, the general consensus is that it is around 50 mph . There are a few other things you can do to maximise efficiency, however. First, try to maintain a constant speed, this will make your engine run as efficiently as possible – use cruise control on flats if you have it. Second, drive at the highest possible gear within the speed limit, this again helps your engine run as economically as possible. Other tips include turning off AC and having as little weight in your car as you can.
what Makes The Car Go
Suppose you are in a battery-powered car stopped on an ordinary level road.Then you start driving. The question is, physically speaking, whatmakes the car go?
There are two possible answers:
- Some people say the engine makes the car go.
- Some people say the force of the tires on the road makesthe car go.
It turns out that both answers are 100% correct! If the engine isn& #X2019 tworking, the car won& #X2019 t go. And if you don& #X2019 t have suitable frictionbetween the tires and the road, the car won& #X2019 t go.
If we look more closely, we see that two different questionsare being answered:
- Where did the kinetic energy come from? Answer: The car supplied itsown energy, converting electrical stored energyto kinetic energy via the engine.
- Where did the momentum come from?Answer: The momentum camefrom outside the car, transferred from the road to the car via the tires.
Some people are shocked to hear that the energy comes from inside thecar while the momentum comes from outside the car. But it& #X2019 s true.
Point to remember: Energy is important. Momentum is important. Whenin doubt, ask yourself
- What& #X2019 s going on with the energy?
- What& #X2019 s going on with the momentum?
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