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Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (26 February 1725 – 2 October 1804) was a French inventor who built the world's first full-size and working self-propelled mechanical land-vehicle, the "Fardier à vapeur" – effectively the world's first automobile.
In the early days of motorised vehicle development, a number of experimenters built steam-powered vehicles with three wheels. The first steam tricycle – and probably the first true self-propelled land vehicle – was Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's 1769 Fardier à vapeur (steam dray), a three-wheeled machine with a top speed of around 3 km/h (2 mph) originally designed for hauling artillery.
Cugnot's steam wagon, the second (1771) version. Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, built a steam-powered vehicle around 1672 as a toy for the Kangxi Emperor. It was small-scale and could not carry a driver, but it was, perhaps, the first working steam-powered vehicle ('auto-mobile'). [4] [13]
London Steam Carriage. The London Steam Carriage was an early steam-powered road vehicle constructed by Richard Trevithick in 1803 and the world's first self-propelled passenger-carrying vehicle. Cugnot had built a steam vehicle 30 years previously, but that had been a slow-moving artillery tractor, not built to carry passengers.
The history of steam road vehicles comprises the development of vehicles powered by a steam engine for use on land and independent of rails, whether for conventional road use, such as the steam car and steam waggon, or for agricultural or heavy haulage work, such as the traction engine. The first experimental vehicles were built in the 18th and ...
Steam car. A Steam Car is a car (automobile) propelled by a steam engine. A steam engine is an external combustion engine (ECE), whereas the gasoline and diesel engines that eventually became standard are internal combustion engines (ICE). ECEs have a lower thermal efficiency, but carbon monoxide production is more readily regulated.
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is widely credited with building the first full-scale, self-propelled mechanical vehicle in about 1769; he created a steam-powered tricycle. [36] He also constructed two steam tractors for the French Army, one of which is preserved in the French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. [36]
(A fardier was a massively built two-wheeled horse-drawn cart for transporting very heavy equipment such as cannon barrels).The original 1769 model.Cugnot's 1770 fardier à vapeur, as preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris.Cut-away drawingThe first "automobile accident"?In 1770, a full-size version of the fardier à ...