Who Owned The Patent
The Benz Patent Motorwagen was truly the Big Bang moment of the passenger car. When Benz met his future wife, Bertha Ringer, he had no idea how important she could play a massive role in the success of his inventions and help steer the automotive industry in a new direction. Earlier in his career, she borrowed money against her dowry, which helped save his business, and helped finance the development process, in which she was also involved.
Going by modern law, she would have received the patent rights. But back then, married women couldn’t apply for patents, so Benz was solely credited for the invention.
What Was The First Electric Car
British electrical engineer Magnus Volk hailed from Brighton and it was in this iconic seaside town that he debuted the worlds first electric car in 1887, a Victorian Toyota Prius.
Like the Patent-Motorwagen it was a three-wheeler, but he would later create a four-wheeled electric car for the Sultan of Turkey.
Benz’s First Factory And Early Inventions
In 1871, at the age of twenty-seven, Karl Benz joined August Ritter in launching the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop in Mannheim, later renamed Factory for Machines for Sheet-metal Working.
The enterprise’s first year went very badly. Ritter turned out to be unreliable, and the business’s tools were impounded. The difficulty was overcome when Benz’s fiancée, Bertha Ringer, bought out Ritter’s share in the company using her dowry.
On 20 July 1872, Karl Benz and Bertha Ringer married. They had five children: Eugen , Richard , Clara , Thilde , and Ellen .
Despite the business misfortunes, Karl Benz led in the development of new engines in the early factory he and his wife owned. To get more revenue, in 1878 he began to work on new patents. First, he concentrated on creating a reliable petrol two-stroke engine. Benz finished his two-stroke engine on 31 December 1879, and was granted a patent for it on 28 June 1880.
Karl Benz showed his real genius, however, through his successive inventions registered while designing what would become the production standard for his two-stroke engine. Benz soon patented the speed regulation system, the ignition using sparks with battery, the spark plug, the carburetor, the clutch, the gear shift, and the water radiator.
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Legacy Of The Us Auto Industry
The automobile has been a key force for change in twentieth-century America. During the 1920s the industry became the backbone of a new consumer goods-oriented society. By the mid-1920s it ranked first in value of product, and in 1982 it provided one out of every six jobs in the United States.
In the 1920s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products. The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands.
The automobile stimulated participation in outdoor recreation and spurred the growth of tourism and tourism-related industries, such as service stations, roadside restaurants and motels. The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 inaugurated the largest public works program in history.
The automobile ended rural isolation and brought urban amenitiesmost important, better medical care and schoolsto rural America . The modern city with its surrounding industrial and residential suburbs is a product of the automobile and trucking.
In 1980, 87.2 percent of American households owned one or more motor vehicles, 51.5 percent owned more than one, and fully 95 percent of domestic car sales were for replacement. Americans have become truly auto-dependent.
Benz And Cie Expansion
large scale production
The great demand for static internal combustion engines forced Karl Benz to enlarge the factory in Mannheim, and in 1886 a new building located on Waldhofstrasse was added. Benz & Cie. had grown in the interim from 50 employees in 1889 to 430 in 1899.
During the last years of the nineteenth century, Benz was the largest automobile company in the world with 572 units produced in 1899.
Because of its size, in 1899, Benz & Cie. became a joint-stock company with the arrival of Friedrich von Fischer and Julius Ganß, who came aboard as members of the Board of Management. Ganß worked in the commercialization department, which is somewhat similar to marketing in contemporary corporations.
The new directors recommended that Benz should create a less expensive automobile suitable for mass production. From 1893 to 1900 Benz sold the four wheel, two seat Victoria, a two-passenger automobile with a 2.2 kW engine, which could reach the top speed of 18 km/h and had a pivotal front axle operated by a roller-chainedtiller for steering. The model was successful with 85 units sold in 1893, and was produced in a four-seated version with face-to-face seat benches called the “Vis-à-Vis”.
From 1894 to 1902, Benz produced over 1,200 of what some consider the first mass-produced car, the Velocipede, later known as the Benz Velo. The early Velo had a 1L 1.5-metric-horsepower engine, and later a 3-metric-horsepower engine. giving a top speed of 19 km/h .
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Who Invented The Car
ByLauren Coxpublished 13 September 17
The history of the automobile is a long and winding road, and pinpointing exactly who invented the car is not a simple matter. But if you rewind the evolution of cars past GPS, past antilock brakes and automatic transmissions and even past the Model T, eventually you’ll get to the Benz Motor Car No. 1, the missing link between cars and horse-drawn buggies.
Karl Benz patented the three-wheeled Motor Car, known as the “Motorwagen,” in 1886. It was the first true, modern automobile. Benz also patented his own throttle system, spark plugs, gear shifters, a water radiator, a carburetor and other fundamentals to the automobile. Benz eventually built a car company that still exists today as the Daimler Group.
Pouring Fuel On The Fire Of The First
It could be argued, of course, that an absurdly talented genius, known to his friends as Leo, beat Benz to designing the first automobile by several hundred years.
Among the many incredible inventions of the great Leonardo da Vinci was a design for the worlds first self-propelled vehicle .
His ingenious contraption, drawn by his hand in 1495, was spring driven and needed to be wound up before setting off, but it was highly complex and, as it turns out, completely feasible.
In 2004, a team from The Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence used da Vincis detailed plans to build a full-scale model, and sure enough, Leonardos Automobile actually did work.
Even more incredibly, the ancient design features the worlds first steering column, and a rack and pinion gear system, the basis of the way we still steer our vehicles today.
To be fair, though, Leonardo probably never got as far as building his idea for a prototype – it actually would have been nearly impossible with the tools available to him at the time – or riding around town on it. He even forgot to include seats.
And, when it comes to the most common modern automobiles we know of today, his automobile was missing something vital that Benzs could boast the first internal-combustion engine, and thus the first petrol car.
Mind you, the Automobile Club de France does still credit Cugnot as the creator of the first car ever. Tres French.
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The Rise And Fall Of Henry Ford
By the start of the 20th century, gasoline-engined cars were fast,reliable, and exciting. They were also stupidly expensive. In 1893, Karl Benz’s simple, Viktoriacar had a price tag of £9000 and hardly anyone could afford onehe sold just 45. Car makers stuck with big, expensive cars,so customers stuck with their horses and carts. Then a bold Americanengineer called Henry Ford came along and decided thingshad to be different.
“It was not at all my idea to make cars in any such petty fashion”Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 1922.
Which Company Made The First Car
That all changed when a still-familiar company made a startling breakthrough. That company was Benz, of Mercedes-Benz fame, which then consisted of the personal foundry of a single engineer: Karl Benz.
Karl Benz believed the problem with steam cars lay in the engine. Steam engines were based on external combustion, that is, the water that drove the pistons was separate from the combustion compartment. Not only was this criminally inefficient, but also it required a huge reservoir of water, which weighed cars down.
Benz instead look to an engine used on French barges, the internal combustion engine. This engine used explosive pellets of coal and resin. They were loaded into a cylinder, where they exploded, driving a piston that turned a paddlewheel. Then, the residue was removed, new pellets were added, made to explode again, etc. It was a lot of work, but it was light, it was cheap, and it was efficient.
Benz made the process automatic by substituting coal for refined oil, which had recently been invented, also by a German. Refined oil burned entirely into gas, and could be pumped in automatically. The only remaining challenge was resetting the piston. Benz developed a system where the piston makes four movements, one to pull air and fuel in, one to compress air and fuel together, a power stroke when the fuel ignites, and a final one to release exhaust.
Benz had invented the four stroke engine, a design that is still used, mostly unchanged, by cars today.
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Rene Panhard And Emile Levassor
Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor were partners in a woodworking machinery business when they decided to become car manufacturers. They built their first car in 1890 using a Daimler engine. Edouard Sarazin, who held the license rights to the Daimler patent for France, commissioned the team. The partners not only manufactured cars, but they also made improvements to the automotive body design.
Panhard-Levassor made vehicles with a pedal-operated clutch, a chain transmission leading to a change-speed gearbox, and a front radiator. Levassor was the first designer to move the engine to the front of the car and use a rear-wheel-drive layout. This design was known as the Systeme Panhard and quickly became the standard for all cars because it gave a better balance and improved steering. Panhard and Levassor are also credited with the invention of the modern transmission installed in their 1895 Panhard.
Panhard and Levassor also shared the licensing rights to Daimler motors with Armand Peugeot. A Peugeot car went on to win the first car race held in France, which gained Peugeot publicity and boosted car sales. Ironically, the “Paris to Marseille” race of 1897 resulted in a fatal auto accident, killing Emile Levassor.
Early on, French manufacturers did not standardize car models each car was different from the other. The first standardized car was the 1894 Benz Velo. One hundred and thirty-four identical Velos were manufactured in 1895.
What Do We Mean By Car Company
There are a surprising number of surviving car companies that can trace their roots back centuries notably, Peugeot was founded in 1810 and spent the mid-19th century cranking out coffee mills before moving into bicycles and, eventually, cars. The company that became Pierce-Arrow was established circa 1872 to make birdcages, among other sundry goods. Obviously, none of these would qualify as the oldest company founded to make carsthey happened into automobiles many years after going into business.
The famed Benz Patent-Motorwagen arrived just a few years later, in 1885, and despite its delicate look and tricycle configuration, it is a remarkably sophisticated, surprisingly fully realized machine. It might well be considered the first serious internal combustion-powered automobile, and its successor, the four-wheeled Velo, is certainly one of the first successful production internal combustion-powered automobiles.
Yet however natural the move into car production was for Karl Benz, whether it was always part of the plan when he founded Benz & Cie. is pure conjecture. Here, were trying to determine who was the first to go into business with the primary goal of building automobiles.
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First What Do We Mean By Car
This can be a trite tactic, but to set the ground rules here, Im going to turn to the dictionary: Merriam-Webster defines an automobile as a usually four-wheeled automotivethat is to say, self-propelledvehicle defined for passenger transportation.
The power source isn’t particularly important here it could be internal combustion, electricity, steam or even clockwork or something. But that last component of the definition, the intention of passenger transportation, is a complicating factor when were trying to determine who built the first carlet alone who started the first car company.
For example, a popular left-field choice for the first automobile is Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, whose 1769 steam wagon at first glance meetshowever nominallyalmost all of the basic criteria for something wed classify as an automobile: It was self-propelled, derived its propulsion from some mechanical means , was at least theoretically steerable and operated independently of rails. Here’s a replica in action:
Im not entirely unsympathetic to this argument, but Cugnots wagon was designed to drag artillery, not haul people that its operators could ride on it as it crept along at a snails pace was incidental. It was not, then, intended to be a personal mobility device. By this criteria, we can also ignore land locomotives and any similar vehicles the purpose of which was traction, rather than transportation.
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.
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Who Was The Original Inventor Of The Car
Karl Benz invented the first practically useful car with a combustion engine, which ran for the first time on New Year’s Eve in 1879.
This was preceded by the first electric car, which was invented by Robert Anderson in 1837, and was able to run off a single charge.
But the original idea for the invention of the car came centuries earlier, in the early 1500s, when painter and architect Leonardo da Vinci sketched a mechanised, horseless cart.
Da Vinci’s vehicle had a steering column and rack and pinion system, of the type seen in modern vehicles.
Charles And Frank Duryea
America’s first gasoline-powered commercial car manufacturers were Charles and Frank Duryea. The brothers were bicycle makers who became interested in gasoline engines and automobiles and built their first motor vehicle in 1893, in Springfield, Massachusetts. By 1896, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company had sold thirteen models of the Duryea, an expensive limousine, which remained in production into the 1920s.
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Where To From There
When was the first car invented is a question as much up for debate as it is definition. Certainly, Gottlieb Daimler has his claims to the title, as he came up with not only that first basic engine, but then a much-refined version, in 1889, featuring a V-shaped, four-stroke, two-cylinder engine, which is far closer to the designs still used today than the single-cylinder unit on the Benz Patent Motorwagen.
In 1927, Daimler and Benz merged to create the Daimler Group, which would one day be Mercedes-Benz.
The Germans soon caught up and overtook them, sure, but still, its a pretty credible claim that you rarely hear Peugeot banging on about.
The first mass produced car, in the modern sense, was the 1901 Curved Dash Oldsmobile, built in Detroit by Ransome Eli Olds, who came up with the concept of the car assembly line, and kicked off the Motor City.
It is the far more famous Henry Ford who generally gets the credit for the first assembly line and the production of cars en masse, with his famous Model T, in 1908.
What he did create was a much improved and bigger version of the assembly line, based on conveyor belts, which much reduced both production costs, and build times, for motor vehicles, soon making Ford the biggest car manufacturer in the world.
The Evolution Of The Car Dates All The Way Back To The 1600s
The very first self-powered road vehicles were powered by steam engines, and by that definition, Nicolas Joseph Cugnot of France built the first automobile in 1769 recognized by the British Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Club de France as being the first. So why do so many history books say that the automobile was invented by either Gottlieb Daimler or Karl Benz? It is because both Daimler and Benz invented highly successful and practical gasoline-powered vehicles that ushered in the age of modern automobiles. Daimler and Benz invented cars that looked and worked like the cars we use today. However, it is unfair to say that either man invented “the” automobile.
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