What Was the First Automobile?

Believe it or not, this is a hard question to answer. The reason is because it depends on what your feelings are that would qualify a device as an automobile. Is it something that has an internal combustion engine? Does it run on steam, gasoline, or electricity? Was it mass produced? Could it hold more than one person? There are a lot of vehicles that could qualify as the first automobile. But first let's look at where this invention came from.

The first recorded designs for a machine that could transport without the aid of horses was actually drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 1400's, but he chose to focus on his art rather than his inventions, so this 'carriage without horses' would have to wait. The first actual attempts at making a moving vehicle without the aid of horses used steam. Around the year 1672, a Jesuit missionary to China named Ferdinand Verbiest created a steam powered carriage as a gift to the emperor. This vehicle was too small to carry anyone, but it's perhaps the first instance of a vehicle that could run under its own power. In the 1770's and 1780's in England, steam powered vehicles were created that were large enough to carry people and cargo. They began to be used often and to growing success, but the Locomotive Act of 1865 effectively killed off the use of steam powered vehicles on public roads. For the rest of the 1800's, England focused more on the railroads than on automobiles.

Steam powered vehicle from 1769

In the 1800's, experiments were created with vehicles that were electric, but most of these weren't practical and weren't beyond models. These tended to be more related to railroads and most electrical powered vehicles inventing was abandoned by the early 20th century. The most popular form of engine for these horseless carriages was an internal combustion engine. By the latter part of the 19th century, this type of engine was the preferred method of power. In 1870 Austria, an inventor named Siegfriend Marcus put one of these engines on a handcart was the first to successfully use a gasoline-powered engine propel a vehicle. Marcus's only patent was an ignition system in 1883. His second vehicle came out in 1888 and featured a carburetor, both of which were important advances in the development of the automobile.

Karl Benz's 1885 automobile design

To answer what was the first automobile is difficult because historians pretty much agree that there were several German inventors who came out with working automobiles with internal combustion gasoline engines around the same time. The most accepted and known of these was the vehicle that Karl Benz created in 1885, even though it was literally a horse carriage with an engine attached. The first completely new design came in 1889 by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach who built a new concept from the ground up.

Daimler/Maybach 1889 automobile design

So it's really hard to explain what the first automobile was. There are other firsts that are easy to explain, such as the first automobile manufacturing company in the United States was the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in 1893. The first automobile company to dominate the US market was Ransom E. Olds's company: the Olds Motor Vehicle Company (you'd know it by its later name Oldsmobile).