The recent bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors have put renewed focus on the importance of automobile manufacturing to America’s self-image. In the United States, most people consider the automobile to be as American as baseball, hot dogs and the 4th of July. Even President Obama has said, “I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”
However, as many experts quickly pointed out, in this case, the President got it wrong. The automobile was not invented in America. Yes, Henry Ford made the automobile affordable to the general public by successfully mass-producing cars on an assembly line, but the concept of the “horseless carriage” pre-dates the Model T by several decades—if not an entire century.
The first self-propelled road vehicle is believed to have been invented by British railway engineer Richard Trevithick. His “road locomotive,” the Puffing Devil, was demonstrated in 1801, but could not maintain enough steam pressure to operate for more than a few minutes at a time. (Other “horseless carriage” designs may have pre-dated Trevithick’s, but none is believed to have actually worked.)
Later mid-19th Century attempts to build a self-propelled road vehicle were plentiful. While Americans were working their way west through the Cumberland Gap, inventors in Switzerland, France and England were strapping clumsy first-generation internal combustion engines—often powered by hydrogen and oxygen—to existing carriage frames in hopes of taking to the open road. Although most of these vehicles could only be described as ambitious failures, they still set the stage for the breakthroughs soon to come.
It was three Germans who finally got the modern automobile up and running. In 1885, Karl Benz invented a three-wheeled Motorwagen powered by his own patented gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. A year later, partners Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach created a four-wheeler built around their own petrol-powered engine design. The Benz and Daimler companies both produced cars in limited quantities—often fewer than 100 per year—throughout the late 1800s, finally popularizing their products through mass production following the turn of the century. (In 1926, the Benz and Daimler companies finally merged to form—you guessed it—Mercedes-Benz.)
In America, the first large-scale mass production of automobiles was done not by Henry Ford, but by Ransom Olds, whose car, the “Oldsmobile,” hit the market in 1902. Henry Ford, who had been manufacturing cars the “old fashioned” way for many years, adapted the assembly line to his company’s operations in 1914, and perfected the concept to the point he could produce a new car every 15 minutes. For the next half-century, America would dominate auto sales worldwide, its chrome-plated, tail-finned, bench-seated, gas-guzzling “land-yachts” serving as the world's gold standard for style and comfort until the oil shocks of the 1970s.
So while Americans may continue to claim the automobile as their own, know that, at its core, the modern automobile actually speaks with a German accent.
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