Who invented the first car? If we're talking about the first modern automobile, then it's Karl Benz in 1886. But long before him, there were strange fore runners to the today's cars, including toys for emperors, steam-powered artillery carriers, and clanking, creaking British buses. Humans have possessed knowledge of the wheel for several thousand years, and we've been using animals as a source of transportation for nearly that long. So, in some sense, the arliest forerunners of the car date back to the earliest mists of our prehistory. But perhaps a more useful way of thinking of the car is anything that could reasonably be called an "automobile" - in other words, any vehicle capable of propelling itself. In that case, we're at most talking about 439 years of car history. The First Engine To some extent, 1672 might seem surprisingly recent for the first car ever. After all, we keep discovering far more ancient analogues for modern items, including everything from Babylonian museums to Roman fish tanks. So why haven't we discovered an ancient Egyptian car inside the pyramids, or even some medieval gadgetry that vaguely approximates an automobile? Cugnot's Car The 1700s were dominated by various inventors working to perfect the steam engine - Thomas Newcomer and James Watt are probably the most famous of these, but there were many more. But the first person to take a steam engine and place it on a full-sized vehicle was probably a Frenchman named Nicolas Joseph Cygnet
, who between 1769 and 1771 built a steam powered automobile more than thirty years before the railway's first steam locomotive.
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