Cars, Trucks, Etc.

The history of cars

There has been lots of cars in the history of cars

By: WIlmer Lemus, Journalist

March 18, 2025

The History of cars goes back to the 1600s. In the late 1600s, a Dutch physicist designed the first internal combustion engine. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that the first automobile was invented and perfected in Germany and France. According to History.com, “Although the automobile was to have its greatest social and economic impact in the United States, it was initially perfected in Germany and France toward the end of the nineteenth century by such men as Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz, Nicolaus Otto, and Emile Levassor.” The term automobile comes from the same word in French and means “self-moving vehicle.

1680 – Dutch physicist, Christiaan Huygens designed (but never built) an internal combustion engine that was to be fueled with gunpowder.
1807 – Francois Isaac de Rivaz of Switzerland invented an internal combustion engine that used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. Rivaz designed a car for his engine—the first internal combustion-powered automobile. However, his was a very unsuccessful design.
1824 – English engineer Samuel Brown adapted an old Newcomen steam engine to burn gas, and he used it to briefly power a vehicle up Shooter’s Hill in London.
1858 – Belgian-born engineer Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir invented and patented (1860) a double-acting, electric spark-ignition internal combustion engine fueled by coal gas. In 1863, Lenoir attached an improved engine (using petroleum and a primitive carburetor) to a three-wheeled wagon that managed to complete a historic fifty-mile road trip.
1862 – Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a French civil engineer, patented but did not build a four-stroke engine (French patent #52,593, January 16, 1862).
1864 – Austrian engineer Siegfried Marcus built a one-cylinder engine with a crude carburetor and attached his engine to a cart for a rocky 500-foot drive. Several years later, Marcus designed a vehicle that briefly ran at 10 mph, which a few historians have considered as the forerunner of the modern automobile by being the world’s first gasoline-powered vehicle (however, read conflicting notes below).
1873 – George Brayton, an American engineer, developed an unsuccessful two-stroke kerosene engine (it used two external pumping cylinders). However, it was considered the first safe and practical oil engine.
1866 – German engineers, Eugen Langen, and Nicolaus August Otto improved on Lenoir’s and de Rochas’ designs and invented a more efficient gas engine.
1876 – Nicolaus August Otto invented and later patented a successful four-stroke engine, known as the “Otto cycle”.
1876 – The first successful two-stroke engine was invented by Sir Dugald Clerk.
1883 – French engineer Edouard Delamare-Deboutteville built a single-cylinder four-stroke engine that ran on stove gas. It is not certain if he did indeed build a car, however, Delamare-Deboutteville’s designs were very advanced for the time — ahead of both Daimler and Benz in some ways, at least on paper.
1885 – Gottlieb Daimler invented what is often recognized as the prototype of the modern gas engine — with a vertical cylinder, and with gasoline injected through a carburetor (patented in 1887). Daimler first built a two-wheeled vehicle the “Reitwagen” (Riding Carriage) with this engine and a year later built the world’s first four-wheeled motor vehicle.
1886 – On January 29, Karl Benz received the first patent (DRP No. 37435) for a gas-fueled car.
1889 – Daimler built an improved four-stroke engine with mushroom-shaped valves and two V-slant cylinders.
1890 – Wilhelm Maybach built the first four-cylinder, four-stroke engine.