What Powered Most Early Cars?
- Though gasoline would become the fuel of choice, early cars came in gas-, steam- and electricity-powered varieties.antique cars image by Charlie Rosenberg from Fotolia.com
The inventors of early cars used vastly different approaches to the design and building of self-propelled vehicles. By the beginning of the 20th Century, the automotive industry was young and full of ideas. Competing automobile manufacturing companies made motor vehicles powered by steam, electricity and gas. At least one company offered hybrid vehicles that ran on both gas and electricity. - In 1769, Nicolas Joseph Cugnot built the first motor vehicle, a steam-powered trolley with a front-mounted engine and a modest top speed of merely two miles-per-hour. Cugnot's steam-powered car had three wheels and fit four passengers. Cugnot designed his steam car as a way to move heavy artillery. The next great breakthrough came in 1825, when Sir Goldsworthy Gurney invented the Gurney Steamer. The six-wheeled Gurney Steamer looked like a stagecoach without horses. Indoor and outdoor seats mounted directly on top of the steam engine led to safety concerns.
- In the 1830s, Scottish inventor Robert Anderson built what is thought to be the first electric carriage. It was a carriage outfitted with a rechargeable battery-powered electric motor. American inventor Thomas Davenport and Scottish inventor Robert Davidson improved upon this early design in the 1840s by doing away with the use of rechargeable battery cells. French models by Gaston Plante in 1865 and Camille Faure in 1881 eclipsed even the designs of Davenport and Davidson with batteries that lasted significantly longer. Inventors continued to produce new electric car designs, including Camille Jenatzy of Belgium. His electric race car, "La Jamais Contente," set a new land speed record when it reached 68 miles-per-hour in 1899. The Philadelphia-based Electric Carriage and Wagon Company became the first commercial producer of electric cars when it sold a line of electric-powered taxicabs to a New York City company in 1897. By 1900, electric cars were the post popular variety of car on the American market.
- According to the Library of Congress, Karl Friedrich Benz invented the first gas-powered automobile in 1885 or 1886. Benz's automobile was a three-wheeled vehicle with a four-cycle internal combustion engine. Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler introduced the first automobile with four wheels in 1886. In 1893, the Duryea brothers invented the first commercially-successful automobile powered by gasoline. (See Reference 4.) As cities grew through the early 20th century and consumers needed safer vehicles that could travel longer distances without stopping, automobiles powered by gasoline became the industry standard (see References).
