Inventions
The Automobile
Also Known As Car
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The automobile is a self powered road vehicle carrying its own engine. Karl Benz filed a patent for his three wheeled Benz Patent-Motorwagen on January 29, 1886, the first vehicle designed as an integrated whole around an internal combustion engine rather than adapted from an existing carriage. Gottlieb Daimler, working independently with Wilhelm Maybach and without ever meeting Benz, fitted his own high speed engine to a modified stagecoach the same year.
Benz is conventionally credited as first by his earlier patent filing date and by having designed a purpose built vehicle rather than a converted carriage; Daimler and Maybach's engine, rather than Benz's chassis design, went on to power the Mercedes marque, so both men are honored together as the automobile's inventors.
Facts
Patent or First-Use Date SignificanceThe automobile reshaped where and how people live and work, created the modern oil, road building and mass manufacturing industries, and remains the dominant form of personal transportation worldwide. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The dominant power source for modern electric vehicles.
In Field
Held Differently
Gottlieb Daimler, Engineers Why this is disputed. Daimler and Maybach developed a four wheeled motorized carriage the same year as Benz, working independently; Benz's earlier patent filing and purpose built chassis are why he alone is usually named first.
Invented By
Preceded By
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
A History of Technology
Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors, Oxford University Press, 1954Associated With: Steel
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Invented By: Gottlieb Daimler
Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler produced their automobiles independently of each other in 1886, working in German towns about sixty miles apart with no evidence of collaboration or shared knowledge of the other's project. Benz filed his patent application for a purpose-built three-wheeled "automobile fueled by gas" on 29 January 1886 and is consequently the figure usually named first and alone as the automobile's inventor. Daimler, working with Wilhelm Maybach, instead motorized an existing stagecoach-style carriage the same year; because his vehicle was a converted horse-drawn design rather than one engineered from the ground up as a motor vehicle, most popular accounts read it as a parallel achievement rather than the founding one, a distinction historians of Daimler's own work regard as arbitrary given how close the two efforts ran.
A dissenting reading, from Historians of Daimler and Maybach's 1886 vehicleWikipedia contributors, Gottlieb Daimler (Wikipedia), Wikimedia Foundation
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