Heart in your throat you realize you havenʼt scrubbed enough speed from the straight-away. You imagine these might be your last moments as the centrifugal forces tug at the car. Will you make it? A blip of the throttle, a quick downshift and you glance toward the thickly lined trees beyond the edge of the road. You wonder if you will join them. But if youʼre going to go, it might as well be in a Ford GT.

Amazingly the car does not threaten to fly into the trees at all. It doesnʼt even flirt with the white line. As if adhered to the road by invisible glue, the car simply pulls out of the corner with barely a whimper from the fat tires. Indeed, it isnʼt until you lay on the throttle that the tires make any noise at all. That is when the carʼs tail dodges out to the side. Pulling your foot off the gas you realize just how careful you must be. With 550 horsepower propelling a car with only 3390 pounds of chassis and bodywork, just a little too much exuberance on the loud pedal can fl ing the rear end out to the side in a split second.

In this issue I will begin a six part series on the automobile. From the humble beginnings as an experimental device to transport artillery, to the modern car which is embedded in the very fabric of modern life, the automobile has had a rich and fascinating history. I will discuss the technical aspects as they relate to the social conditions of the time, and look at how the economy - and social mood - affected and continues to affect the types of cars produced.

Origins

Despite many years of debate the true originator of the self-propelled vehicle is still in doubt . A number of sources claim that the first true steam powered car was built as early as 1672, by a Jesuit missionary in China. But the more common assignation is made to Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, a French inventor. Trained as a military engineer, his primary avocation was as a developer of vehicles for the French army. Though steam power had already been in use since the early 1700s for pumping water from mines, no one at the time knew how to convert the reciprocal motion of a piston into the rotary motion needed to propel a vehicle.

Figure 1 Cugnot's "Fardier a Vapeur" ca. 1771

Cugnot - completing his machine in 1769 - appears to have been the first to develop the familiar connecting rod system (seen for example in steam locomotives) which could actually turn wheels. Despite a somewhat cumbersome looking design, his efforts were successful. Called a Fardier a Vapeur (Steam Dray) the vehicle was reputed to pull a substantial four tons, and could run at speeds as high as 4 km per hour. Obviously this wasnʼt going to break any land speed records, but the towing power was comparable to a modern heavy-duty pickup truck. Not bad for a first effort.