preview

The Invention of the Automobile Essay

Best Essays

Since the development of the steam engine people had been interested in creating self-powered vehicles, this manifested during the industrial revolution as the train. However, as time went on people became interested in creating a vehicle that wasn’t confined to tracks. The earliest attempts were moderately successful but served little practical purpose. Automobiles first began to truly spread with the invention of the electric motor which created cheaper, more powerful, and safer automobiles. Still the automobile still had numerous problems and were mainly in the hands of the rich. It was the development of the internal combustion engine and the assembly line that was truly able to create a practical vehicle that could be used by all and …show more content…

Many other people continued the development and improvement of electric automobiles and for a time electric automobiles were the preferred type of Automobile because of their quiet ride, quick start-up, and lack of pollution. In fact electric automobiles held the land speed record well into the early 1900’s. However, they began to decline in the early 1900’s because of the increased prevalence and efficiency of the internal combustion engine.
The invention and use of the internal combustion engine was a pivotal point in the history of the automobile. The first attempt at an internal combustion engine was in 1673 by Christian Huygens, using gunpowder as the fuel source, though it was basically worthless as you had to open the engine up and put new gunpowder in it after every single stroke ("The Fuel & Engine"). This lack of a fuel for internal combustion engines sidelined its development for a couple hundred years. In 1860 Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir built the first effective internal combustion engine using natural gas (Bottorff). The ignition of the gas would create a vacuum and the resulting pressure difference between the vacuum and the atmosphere would drive the power stroke (Bottorff). This gas-atmospheric engine, as it is known, was an effective system capable generating 20hp, still it was imperfect. It was further improved with the development

Get Access