Early Car Developments

It is claimed that in 1839, Robert Anderson built the first electric-powered road vehicle in Scotland, along with other than were generally unsuccessful. Besides being very noisy, the steamer had to wait for a boiler to build up pressure so the concept of an electrical engine that could start immediately and was quiet, was a very attractive idea for sure. But there were disadvantages, electric batteries were heavy, bulky, unreliable, and needed recharging after a short run.

There was a general improvement in the development of longer-lasting batteries in 1880.  There still existed the boundless weight and bulk of the batteries and a need for often rechargings, although electric cabs appeared on the streets of London in the late 1800s. Steamers and electric vehicles gained only confined acceptance on the continent. On April 29, 1899, in France, Camille Jenatzy, driving a Jeantaud electric, pushed the cigar-shaped vehicle to a record of sixty miles per hour, giving the electric car a shining, brief hour of public acclaim.

But the high-speed run burned out the specially developed batteries and the interest in electrics died almost as soon as the cheers of the attending crowd. It was in America that steamers and electric cars gained their most sustained amount of success. Eventually twenty different U.S. car companies would produce electric cars and in the peak of popularity, 1912, nearly 35,000 were out on the American roads.

Steamers were actually more popular because America could not shake the limitations of the bulky batteries and the short driving distances. Over 100 American plants were making steamers, the most famous being the Stanley brothers factory in Newton, Massachusetts.recharging.  The “Stanley Steamer” acquired the affectionate nickname, “The Flying Teapot,” for good reason. In 1906, a Stanley Steamer was tested at 127.6 miles per hour on the sands of Ormond Beach, Florida. In spite of this, the steamers and the electrics, were only living on borrowed time.

Experiments were being done on an automobile powered by a gasoline-fueled, internal-combustion engine, and the steamers and electrics would not survive the clash of the coming collision. Internal-combustion engines did not just appear the scene all of a sudden to push the electrics and steamers off the road. The theories had been on the way ever since 1860, when Etienne Lenoir applied to the authorities in Paris for a patent on his invention, an internal-combustion engine running on coal gas.

A few years later, Lenoir hooked his engine to a carriage and even though it was crude, it worked. It worked so poorly and so slowly (about one mile an hour), however, that he became discouraged and relinquished his efforts. A resourceful Austrian in Vienna, Siegfried Marcus, in 1864, built a one-cylinder engine that combined a crude carburetor and a magneto set-up to create successive small explosions that applied alternating pressure against the piston within the cylinder. Attaching this engine to a cart, Siegfried geared the piston to the rear wheels, and while a strong, human, assistant lifted the rear of the cart off the ground, Siegfried started the engine.

The wheels began to turn and repeatedly turned with each successive “pop.” Marcus signaled the assistant to lower the cart and watched it burp along for about 500 feet before it ran out of fuel. Ten years later, he produced a new, improved form of his motorcar, and then, mysteriously washed his hands of the entire thing, saying it was a waste of time. (The second model, which is preserved in an Austrian museum, was refurbished and taken for a test run in Vienna in 1950. Although Lenoir and Marcus did not have the determination to pursue their inventions, they made valuable contributions to the theory of the internal-combustion engines.