Nicolas Joseph Cugnot

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (26 February 1725 – 2 October 1804) was a French inventor. He is known to have built the first working self-propelled mechanical vehicle, the world's first automobile. This claim is disputed by some sources, however, which suggest that Ferdinand Verbiest, as a member of a Jesuit mission in China, may have been the first to build, around 1672, a steam-powered vehicle but that was too small to carry a driver or passengers.

1769 Model

Nicolas Cugnot had started experimenting with working models of steam powered vehicles in 1765 and after four years was prepared to build his first working example. At the Paris Arsenal, Cugnot instructed his mechanic, a man named Brezin, to develop a three-wheeled military tractor utilizing a steam motor, which was to be utilized by the French armed force to haul heavy canons. Cugnot resolved the issue of converting the back-and-forth motion of a steam piston into a rotary motion. His Fardier à vapeur (steam wagon) was the first endeavor, and the next year he made changes to his extraordinary spluttering and murmuring steam beast. The new vehicle had two back wheels and one front wheel, which supported the steam boiler. It was steered by a tiller and rumored to have been equipped for pulling four tons of artillery.

With a top rate of 4 km/h, and no horse power, the vehicle needed to stop each ten to fifteen minutes to develop sufficient steam force to finish the task. A fairly inelegant issue, but a breakthrough.

First automobile accident

Scarcely after a year, Cugnot made his innovation a stride further and fabricated a steam-powered tricycle that could convey four travelers. At the same time, he slammed the vehicle into a stone wall, forever his name in the history books as the first individual to be involved in a motor vehicle accident. His bad fortunes continued with when one of his supporters died and the other was banished. Funds for Cugnot's street vehicle tries immediately gone away and his prize for his inventive work was a yearly annuity of 600 francs, granted by King Louis XV. That excessively was withdrawn with begin of the French Revolution and Cugnot died in Paris, almost poverty stricken.

Reference : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Joseph_Cugnot