Cars: Driving Into History
Tom Standage reveals the early evolution of the motor car from its disjointed steam and bicycle origins to the Ford Model T
The origins of the automobile explained
The car is an inescapable fact of modern life. Along with other motorised road vehicles, it can be used for personal journeys, power economies and move entire armies. In transportation terms, it has completely changed the way humanity has administered, laid out and policed itself since it was invented in the 1880s.
The car’s ubiquity has been revolutionary and transformed the human experience in just over 100 years. Its presence has had a significantly positive and – as climate change makes increasingly clear
– negative impact on the world. Today, the relationship between people and cars is under ever increasing scrutiny.
However, compared to the current debate, the car’s origins are less well known and its early history is intriguing and often surprising.
Tom Standage, the author of the recently published A Brief History of Motion, is an expert on historical engineering and technology. His new book explores the confused and bumpy road that led to the invention of the car and how it became an essential part of the modern world’s development. He discusses steam-powered road vehicles, why the inventions of cars, bicycles and railways are inextricably linked, and how smartphones could shape the future of transport.
STEAM & BICYCLES How old is the concept of the car?
The word ‘car’ has meant different things at different times. At the end of the 19th century, a car was a ‘streetcar,’ ie a tram. Before streetcars there were ‘horse cars’, which were omnibuses pulled by horses on rails. The word ‘car’ became applicable to what was previously called a ‘horseless carriage’ or possibly a motor car. The ‘automobile’, as they call it in America, was itself an import from the French.
The history of this is deep and has a very tortuous path with lots of detours that gets us to the car. Steam engines, buses and various kinds of carriages played important parts but the car is really descended from the bicycle and not the steam train.
We generally think of the 1886 Benz Patent-motorwagen as the first proper car. Carl Benz built an entirely new vehicle around an internal combustion engine and used bicycle parts to do it. It was really a motorised bicycle so this is what makes the car interesting. Its innovation required lots of people to try different things and, although this seems obvious in retrospect, it wasn’t at the time.
When were the first steam-powered road vehicles developed?
The first steam engines were large, fixed and used to pump water out of coal mines. James Watt figured out a way to make them a lot smaller in the 1760s, and then you had the first attempt by a Frenchman called Nicolas-joseph Cugnot to build a self-powered steam vehicle. You could say that it was the first car but it didn’t go very fast. It only travelled at about 5kph and the problem was that its steam engine was the size of a modern Fiat 500. It was a huge thing stuck to the front wheel of this vehicle and when you wanted to steer you had to swing the entire steam engine. It was very big, slow, heavy, hard to steer and trashed the roads it went on. It actually crashed almost immediately into a wall.
The French Army was funding this because they thought it would be an easier way to pull cannons than horses. However, they gave up and not much happened until 1801 when Richard Trevithick built the ‘Puffing Devil’, which was much smaller. It was basically a steam engine on wheels but had similar problems. It caught fire and he built another one called the ‘London Steam Carriage’ to carry people. He trialled it in London in 1803 but (like Cugnot’s vehicle) it carved up the roads. It was really heavy, hard to steer and crashed.
What Trevithick then said was: “We can fix the steering and road problem if we just put the vehicles on rails.”
There were rail systems in mines but they were pulled by horses. Mine owners said: “Perhaps we can use steam power
instead?” So Trevithick built a steam engine for one of those people and proved that it worked. This ultimately led to steam railways.
Steam vehicles like Cugnot’s and Trevithick’s were not reliable but during the 1820s two interesting things happened. Steam engines become more reliable and the ‘omnibus’ was invented. The omnibus is a horse-drawn vehicle that can seat about a dozen people.
It started to become popular and people realised you could make omnibuses more efficient if you put them on rails.
At that point, people had given up on ‘land locomotives’ and they didn’t like the idea of putting one on an omnibus. They were noisy, smelly, carved up roads and could explode. However, if you took the idea of the horse-drawn, rail omnibus then you had a faster, more efficient service. In America, these ‘horse cars’ were electrified and so you had trams.
Meanwhile, there was the railway and bicycle boom. By the 1890s there were trams, fast trains and bicycles for personal transport. The big question was, “Could you have a form of transport that was personal but also fast?” The answer ultimately became the car.
HORSELESS CARRIAGES The German engineer Carl Benz patented the first car in 1886. What was the importance of his wife Bertha to the car’s development?
Benz’s first car was a three-wheeler and he wanted to perfect it because it wasn’t very good going uphill and the brakes were rubbish.
Bertha stole the prototype and went on the first ever road trip to see her mother. She didn’t tell her husband but took her sons to help her push it uphill.
This trip has been mythologised but there is a kernel of truth to it. During this trip, Bertha figured out various things such as that the brakes needed to be better and a better lower gear was required to get up hills. She actually stopped at a cobbler’s and had him put leather on the brake pads to improve them. Carl then adopted that approach.
The fact that Bertha showed you could use this car for a road trip (she travelled 65km) gave Carl the confidence that he actually had a sellable product. He put it on sale at a trade fair and people were amazed. He started selling them, along with the rights, to other people around Europe so they could manufacture them.
What were early cars like?
Early cars were internal combustion engines fitted to carriages, which is why they were called ‘horseless carriages’. They didn’t have doors, roofs, windows, weren’t lockable and had carriage lamps. You steered them with a tiller and you wouldn’t want to go out in the rain with them, so they weren’t very practical. At the beginning of the 20th century there were two kinds of cars. There were big, expensive ‘touring cars’ that were sometimes called ‘road locomotives’. They had a big engine at the front, could go very fast and far and get over bumpy roads. Then there were smaller vehicles called ‘runabouts’, which were lightweight, wooden carriages that would have been pulled by horses but were modified to have an engine. You could use them for short trips on good roads but you wouldn’t want to go on a long trip with them because they had a tiny fuel capacity. However, they were relatively cheap so you could buy one for driving around town.
How quickly did the car replace horsedrawn and steam vehicles?
It wasn’t really directly competing with steam. As steam trains became more popular they increased the demand for horses to move stuff within cities. Rail companies often ran the biggest stables in a city and there were fleets of horsedrawn carriages that were used for delivery or as taxis.
More horses meant that people were looking for alternatives by the 1890s because of the mess and pollution. It was a very similar situation to today where we recognise that car pollution is unsustainable. Department stores were actually some of the earliest adopters of steam or electric automobiles because they needed transport that moved around within cities quite easily.
The number of horses dropped extremely quickly in America. Although it is an outlier, America was the perfect place for cars to take off. Cars initially had no roofs and places like California had warm weather, rich people and cheap gas. You also had big, wide roads whereas adapting cars to medieval street plans in Europe was a lot harder.
The numbers are amazing. America went from having 800 cars in 1900 to eight million in 1920. That’s a thousandfold increase, which is the same as doubling every two years. We associate
“The numbers are amazing. America went from having 800 cars in 1900 to eight million in 1920”