History of Cars
The first working vehicle to take to the roads with an internal combustion engine was a coach made by British inventor, Samuel Brown. The coach made its ascent up Shooters Hill in Kent in 1826. It proved to be very slow and expensive to run.
After this it was discovered that the most efficient vehicles were those that used a four-stroke combustion engine and were fuelled using petrol. The first vehicles to work on this basis were the German Daimler and Benz cars, both of which first took to the road in 1886.
Following this, in 1888, the first two-stroke engine was fitted to a motor vehicle. This happened with a motor tricycle that was built by an Englishman by the name of Edward Butler. The Wankel engine, as it became known, was then invented by a man called Dr Felix Wankel of Germany was then offered in a production car for the first time in 1957, by the company NSU.
Most of the basic elements that we see in modern cars had been invented by the end of the nineteenth century. The jet carburetor, for instance, was invented by Edward Butler in 1884 and is fitted to nearly all modern petrol cars. In addition, the 1886 Benz car had a differential gear in its driving axle - the first instance of this use within a petrol engine.
The first compression engine (known as the diesel engine) was patented in Britain in 1890 by a man called Herbert Akroyd-Stuart. This was improved upon by in 1893 by the German, Rudolf Diesel, and it was then that it achieved widespread use in the motor vehicle.
The first petrol-engined cars were braked ,like horse vehicles and it is because of this that we have come to talk about a cars 'brake horsepower'. This was done by the means of blocks applied to the rear types. The results produced were more efficient than drum brakes that had been fitted to the rear wheels of the Renault car in 1902. Brakes in all four wheels then became known in the 1920's. Hydraulic actuation, which applied more power than the unaided hand lever or foot pedal, was introduced in the US by Duesenberg.