A crowded workshop era
By the middle of the 1880s, several things had come together. Four-stroke engines existed, gasoline, a product of petroleum refining, could be bought, and bicycle makers had shown that light wheels, tubular frames and chain drive could work well on roads. In different places, engineers who understood these pieces began to ask whether they could be combined into a carriage with its own motor. The answer arrived almost simultaneously in more than one place, which is why the story of the first car has no neat ending.
Karl Benz in Mannheim
Karl Benz had run a small engine business and had already built a two-stroke gas engine. In 1885 he completed a three-wheeled vehicle, and in January 1886 he applied for a patent on it, which was granted later that year. The vehicle’s single-cylinder four-stroke engine sat behind the seat, with a belt and chains driving the rear wheels. It had a tubular steel frame, wire-spoked wheels with solid rubber tires and an electric spark ignition, and it was designed as one complete machine rather than a motor added to a horse carriage. That integrated design is the main reason Benz is often credited with the first practical gasoline-powered automobile.
Sales at first were slow. The car’s real breakthrough in public attention came in August 1888, when his wife Bertha, with their two sons, drove a Motorwagen from Mannheim to Pforzheim, a trip of about 100 kilometers, without telling her husband beforehand. On the way she is said to have bought fuel from a pharmacy, cleaned a fuel line with a hatpin and had a blacksmith repair a chain. Parts of this story have been retold many times, so details may have been polished, but the trip itself is generally accepted and showed that the car could cover real distances.
Daimler and Maybach in Stuttgart
Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, who had both worked on engines at the Deutz company, set up their own workshop and built a small, fast-running gasoline engine in the mid-1880s. They tested it first on a wooden two-wheeled machine in 1885, often called the Reitwagen and considered an early motorcycle, and in 1886 fitted a similar engine to a stagecoach. Their approach differed from Benz’s: they developed a compact engine that could be fitted to many kinds of vehicles, boats and other machines. Benz and Daimler worked only a short distance apart without meeting for most of their careers, and their companies merged in 1926 to form Daimler-Benz.
France: Panhard, Levassor and Peugeot
In France, the firm Panhard & Levassor obtained a license to build Daimler engines and began making cars around 1890. Émile Levassor’s layout, with the engine at the front, a clutch and gearbox, and drive to the rear wheels, became the standard pattern for decades, replacing the earlier idea of a carriage with an engine added underneath. Armand Peugeot also began building cars with Daimler engines in the early 1890s. Earlier, Amédée Bollée had built vehicles driven by steam engines in the 1870s, a reminder that not all the pioneers used gasoline.
Race events accelerated progress. A 1894 trial from Paris to Rouen, and a longer 1895 race from Paris to Bordeaux and back, gave makers a way to prove reliability in public. These events also encouraged the use of pneumatic tires, which Michelin tested on a car in 1895, though the early air-filled tires were prone to punctures.
Other claims and contenders
Elsewhere, the picture is more tangled. In Austria, Siegfried Marcus built handcarts and later vehicles with petroleum engines in the 1870s and 1880s, and some sources credit him with the first gasoline car. The dates and the exact form of his machines are disputed, and historians are cautious about them. In the United States, brothers Charles and Frank Duryea built a gasoline car in Springfield, Massachusetts, and ran it in 1893, then won an early American road race in 1895. Elwood Haynes tested a car in Indiana in 1894. George Selden obtained a broad American patent on the “road engine” in 1895, even though his design had not been successfully built at the time, a patent that later caused legal disputes with Henry Ford.
Why credit is shared
There are three reasons historians avoid naming a single winner. First, “automobile” can be defined in different ways: the earliest steam road vehicle, the first with an internal combustion engine, the first gasoline car, or the first sold to customers. Second, several people worked at once on similar ideas using shared technology, from bicycle components such as bicycle chains to engines that had been public knowledge for years. Third, many early records are patents, newspaper reports and recollections written afterward, and they do not always agree.
A common summary is that Benz is the most frequently credited for the first practical gasoline-powered car, Daimler and Maybach for the first high-speed gasoline engine suited to vehicles, and Panhard and Levassor for the car layout that lasted. That is a fair summary, but it is a simplification.
From experiments to a business
By the end of the 1890s, a few hundred cars were being produced each year by a growing number of firms in Europe and North America. They were costly and unreliable by modern standards. Fuel was sold in small cans, roads were poorly suited to them, and drivers needed mechanical skill. Yet the basic idea had been proven, and the next phase, building cars cheaply and in quantity, was waiting for someone to work out the production methods.