The first automobiles

Henry Ford's first car

The idea of using an engine of some kind to turn the wheels of a carriage is really quite old. The first automobile accident happened in 1769, nearly 250 years ago. A steam carriage built by the Frenchman Nicolas Cugnot overturned on a curve. It was traveling less than three miles an hour!

In 1831 steam carriages carrying 18 passengers were making regular trips between cities in England. They averaged about five miles an hour. But toll road keepers began raising their rates on steam carriages. People sometimes threw stones at the car­riages. The government also began passing laws against them. One of these laws, called the Red Flag law, said that a man had to walk in front of any steam carriage and carry a red flag during the day or a red lantern at night. All these factors kept the steam carriages from becoming very popular in England.

In Germany, a few years later, men developed new ideas about engines. Nikolaus Otto made an engine in 1876 that worked very much like a modern gasoline engine. In 1885 Gottlieb Daimler successfully mounted a small model of this engine on a bicycle. This engine burned kerosene. In that same year another German, Karl Benz, built a three-wheel car that was driven by a gasoline engine. The modern car grew out of many of these older ideas.

The first gasoline car in the United States was built in 1892 by Charles and Franklin Duryea of Springfield, Mass. It was a buggy with a two-cylinder engine fastened to the back axle. The Duryeas were not satisfied with this car, however, and the next year they made a better one. Very soon afterward Elwood Haynes, R. E. Olds, Henry Ford, and others had built cars.