From the archives of Bob Montgomery
THE FIRST POWERED VEHICLES: The question is often asked of this columnist "Which was the first vehicle to be moved by 'artificial' power?" The answer lies further back in time than might be imagined.
Leaving aside a vehicle designed by Leonardo da Vinci which was almost certainly never built, it fell to the French to produce the very first powered vehicle. In 1769 the French Ministry of War commissioned the Commandant of artillery to make a steam 'truck' for carrying cannon to the design of one Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. The completed vehicle, the voiture en petit, was tested in 1770 and could carry four people at the heady speed of 2 ½ mph, but had the overwhelming disadvantage of having to stop to allow the boiler to be re-filled with water every 15 minutes.
The second Cugnot vehicle was completed by May 1771 and could carry four tons of equipment, but by then the French government had lost interest and nothing further came of it. However, in unofficial trials it reportedly ran well and even contrived to famously have a collision with a wall.
The next recorded powered vehicle was developed by the famous Cornish engineer and pioneer of the non-condensing high-pressure steam engine, Richard Trevithick, in Britain. His steam road locomotive climbed Camborne Beacon with seven or eight men on board on Christmas Eve 1801.
Trevithick, in partnership with Andrew Vivian, designed and built an improved version which was assembled in London and fitted with bodywork in 1903.
The Celebrated London Carriage, as it became known, was reliable, easily controllable and could run at 10 mph. Sadly, no financial backing was forthcoming and Trevithick dismantled his vehicle in 1804 abandoning any further experiments.
Trevithick's American contemporary, Oliver Evans, "America's James Watt", who had developed the high-pressure engine independently at the same time, also experimented with steam-wagons.
In 1805 he developed a steam powered device somewhat by chance. He had been commissioned by the Philadelphia Board of Health to make a dock-cleaning pontoon with steam dredging machinery and a stern paddle wheel. Having constructed it, Evans was faced with the problem of moving it about a mile and a half from his workshop to the river. To do so he designed and built a "stout-wheeled undercarriage" to place underneath the barge with a 5hp engine.
After several failures, the Orukter Amphibolos (Snorting Swimmer) managed to travel the distance under its own power and allow the barge to be floated free.
The first internal-combustion engined vehicle was probably designed by Samuel Brown of Brompton, England, in 1824. This device was driven by an adaptation of his patent 'gas-vacuum engine' which burnt coal-gas. His carriage climbed Shooter's Hill, Blackheath, but his two-cylinder engine produced only 4 hp and was considerably more expensive to run than a comparable steam engine with the result that there was no interest in it.
It was in France that the first commercially practical engine was patented by Ettiene Lenoir in 1860. Its simplicity and reliability made it a success and the Lenoir engine continued in manufacture until the 1890s. In 1863, Lenoir made a crude 'motor car' powered by a version of this engine. Heavy and underpowered, it took around an hour and a half to travel a distance of six miles.
IAustria, Siegfried Markus exhibited a car at the Vienna Exhibition of 1873. This car survives today and can claim to be the world's oldest surviving 'petrol' car in the world. The car could travel at 5 mph and boasted magneto-electric ignition and an ingenious carburettor, but Markus made no attempt to develop his invention commercially.