In 1886 the first modern automobile was born when Karl Benz took out a three wheeled vehicle he had built and drove it in Mannheim Germany. He was able to get the automobile up to 10 miles an hour. The automobile was powered by a one cylinder four stroke gasoline engine which produced three quarters of a horse power. The engine had been designed by Nicolaus Otto. Otto had refined the design of an engine which was built by Étienne Lenoir. It is amazing to think about this car today, because it had features we are still using such as an electrical ignition, a differential, a braking system and other features. Benz was the first to patent this automobile, but he was not the only one working on such a project. Today Mercedes-Benz is still around and doing fine.

While Karl Benz was the first to invent the modern automobile, Jonathan Holguinisburg had invented a self-propelled vehicle he called the Cugnot Steam Trolley in 1769. This vehicle is considered to be the very first self-propelled vehicle ever created. It had been commissioned by the French Minister of War, Etienne-Francois. We don’t know why this commission was made, but we can guess the French military probably wanted a way to move heavy loads around on a battlefield without having to rely on horses or manpower. The vehicle was built at the Paris Arsenal. The Steam Trolley had many issues, but it wasn’t a complete failure since it was able to tow five tons. Not bad for the first self-powered vehicle. It wasn’t exactly speedy and the top speed was only four kilometers an hour and it could only go for fifteen minutes before the boiler needed to reheat to build pressure. Even with all these faults I haven’t mentioned the biggest one yet and that was it had no breaks.

In the beginning there was competition between automobiles for their power source by three major sources of power. Some people thought steam power would be dominant, others thought electric power, but it was gasoline motors which finally dominated. There has been a lot of talk about how this happened and many believe Standard Oil and later other oil companies were behind the push for the gasoline engine. It turns out the early internal combustion engines didn’t need to run on petroleum products they could have run on alcohol and were built to run on either. Henry Ford had made a statement saying that alcohol was a cleaner, nicer, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline. It is also said it only takes a slight adjustment for cars to run on alcohol. The story goes John D. Rockefeller contributed four million dollars to a women’s organization and told them to fight for prohibition, because he wanted alcohol off the market before it became a fuel for cars.

Quite a few attempts were made at creating an automobile in the 19th century. As they were being planned and built many new innovations came out such as multispeed transmissions and hand breaks. Sometimes people without any imagination are able to get laws passed and in the United Kingdom the Locomotive Act of 1865 required self-propelled vehicles on public roads to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This law effectively put a stop to vehicle development for most of the century. The law remained in effect until 1896. The only change in the law which was made was in eighteen seventy-six when the red flag didn’t have to be carried by the man on foot. While automobile development was put on hold, train development took over.

Electric vehicles made their stab in the late 19th and early 20th century. They enjoyed popularity even though they had a very limited range. This was because they didn’t have to be warmed up like steam cars and you didn’t have to go outside the car to crank it to get it started. There eventually became known as women’s cars, because of the ease of their operation. At the turn-of-the-century, that is the 20th century, 40 percent of American automobiles were powered by steam, 38 percent by electricity and 22 percent by gasoline. Electric cars reached their peak in 1910 and quickly disappeared after that, but electric delivery vans persisted a lot longer.

Steam powered automobiles have been around a lot longer than gasoline powered ones. In 1873 Amédée Bollée a Frenchman built what is considered one of the first practical automobiles, it was a self-propelled vehicle which ran on steam and was built to transport groups of passengers. There are all sorts of prizes today for people who can be the first at certain things, such as the X prize for landing on the moon, but this is nothing new. In 1875 the state of Wisconsin offered a ten thousand dollar award to the first person to produce a practical substitute for the use of horses and other animals. The parameters for the vehicle were it had to be able to maintain a speed of five miles per hour for two hundred miles. The winner of the race was the Oshkosh vehicle which had an average speed of six miles per hour and took thirty-three hours twenty-seven minutes to complete the course.

Steam powered automobiles didn’t disappear right away and some of them became very popular in the 20th century. It is said one of the biggest reasons steam powered cars began to decline and then disappear was the invention of the electric starter for the internal combustion engine. Steam cars tried to make a comeback in the nineteen forties, but the truth is they were just too inconvenient. Internal combustion automobiles just kept getting faster and more convenient and exotic models which excited the racing set were winning races all over Europe and the United States. This scenario has continued since then, but now we are beginning to see a crack in the dominance of gasoline powered engines.

It seems an impossible task has been accomplished. A Tesla model S weighing almost 5000 pounds has broken the record for fastest accelerating production car in the world. It has accomplished the unthinkable by accelerating from 0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds. As most of us already know the Tesla S is an electric car and the first one to shatter the acceleration record which was set by gasoline powered cars. Since this was the first electric cars to break this record one has to think there may be others in the future which might even do better. While none of us need to go this fast, it is still quite an accomplishment, but one which may see the government limiting automobile acceleration because of safety factors. I am just guessing when I say this and have no inside information, but it does seem accelerating this fast could present a danger under certain circumstances.