Ahem, Mr. President!

Don't know if you caught it yesterday (if not you can see it here), but in the middle of his address to congress, president Obama stated emphatically, "the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it." This seemed to imply that the United States was that nation and not Germany as everyone knows it was (except as we're about to discover, it wasn't). Of course, the US was the first nation to truly mass produce the automobile, thanks to Henry and his "T" but that's another story.

From the moment he said it the internet and radio were abuzz with corrective statements attempting to lead the President's attention to one Karl Benz of the then recently united Germany, who's 1885-6 Motorwagen is irrefutably the first commercially available vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine. Well then, job well done everybody. Glad we could bring this to the attention of an administration charged with running the most powerful nation in the world. Aren't we all so smart...

Shut up everyone until you know what you're talking about. That's the lesson here. Clearly Herr Benz was very much on the cutting edge of internal combustion technology in his day, and was the first to patent his invention. But to name him as the father of all that is the automobile is to ignore the efforts of many others. Here I will name but four.

1. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, 1885-6: At the same tim that Benz was finishing off his Motorwagen, Maybach and Daimler were putting the finishing touches on the engine that would make the motorcar more a practical concern and less a novelty. The fact that the work of these two men went on separate from, and without detailed knowledge of the work of Benz, and the broader application of their work (they created the first motorcycle, and were the first to use four wheels on an gas-powered vehicle, they also were the first to apply their new engine to marine craft).

2. Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, 1769: This gentleman almost certainly created the first self-propelled vehicle that did not require a fabricated running surface (a track in other words). Cugnot's fardier à vapeur (Roughly: "Steam Wagon") was designed at the behest of Louis XV of France to carry heavy artillery pieces (incidentally, in may have also been involved in the first car crash when it went out of control and smashed into the wall of an Arsenal), but was abandoned due to poor performance. If though, an automobile is defined as a vehicle that is able to run without a prepared track, carries its own power source and some fuel, is able to carry a load other than that required to power it, and can be controlled from within (and I think that's a pretty good definition), then this is really where it first came together.

3. Ferdinand Verbiest, 1672: Bit of a mystery here, and there's some debate as to whether it was ever built. Even if it was, it doesn't satisfy all the requirements of being an automobile because it almost certainly couldn't have been ridden, or controlled. Still, this Jesuit monk at least created a design for what, if it was indeed built, would have been a very early example of a self propelled vehicle. I for one find this sketch somehow darling with its modified Hero's Engine concept driving an impeller. It's the first turbine car!

So, I hope this has cleared up a little bit for some people. In between of course go the lives of countless imitators and innovators who's stories will have to be recounted another day. Now if you're ever elected to the highest office in the land, you'll know the history of the industry to which you're offering a bailout, back to its earliest incarnations. And if you're the internet charged with correcting that person, you won't sound like an idiot for starting more than two hundred years after the story began.