Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was the first car invented?
In 1879, Benz was granted a patent for his first engine, which had been designed in 1878. Many of his other inventions made the use of the internal combustion engine feasible for powering a vehicle. His first "Motorwagen" was built in 1885 in Mannheim, Germany. He was awarded the patent for its invention as of his application on 29 January 1886 (under the auspices of his major company, Benz & Cie., which was founded in 1883). Benz began promotion of the vehicle on 3 July 1886, and about 25 Benz vehicles were sold between 1888 and 1893, when his first four-wheeler was introduced along with a model intended for affordability. They also were powered with four-stroke engines of his own design. Emile Roger of France, already producing Benz engines under license, now added the Benz car to his line of products. Because France was more open to the early cars, initially more were built and sold in France through Roger than Benz sold in Germany. In August 1888 Bertha Benz, the wife of Karl Benz, undertook the first road trip by car, to prove the road-worthiness of her husband's invention.
The first car sold from the house is a SUV, called DR5, with Chery components and Bosch electronic. This model was presented as a prototype at the 31º Bologna Motor Show in 2006.
Dr5 was the first DR model, launched in November 2007, and for the occasion Massimo Di Risio celebrated the moment with the symbolic gesture of punching the chassis number on the first car produced.
In 1902, the first modern electrical air conditioning unit was invented by Willis Carrier in Buffalo, New York. After graduating from Cornell University, Carrier found a job at the Buffalo Forge Company. There, he began experimenting with air conditioning as a way to solve an application problem for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn, New York. The first air conditioner, designed and built in Buffalo by Carrier, began working on 17 July 1902.
In 1911, Buick introduced its first closed-body car, four years ahead of Ford, but five years after Cadillac, which was the first. The car was built at the all-new factory in Flint which later became to be known as Buick City. Buick during the 1920s made various sized vehicles, with series designations for different years, sometimes using numbers, while later years using lettered designations. One of the larger vehicles, with straight-six, was the Buick Master Six.
The factory was founded on 2nd August 1916 as the Moscow Automotive Society or AMO (). The factory was completed in 1917, just before the Revolution, and was built south of Moscow near Moscow River in Tjufeleva grove. It was a modern building with the latest in American equipment and was designed to employ 6,000 workers. The plans were to produce Fiat F-15 1.5-ton trucks under license. Because of the October Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War it took until 1st November 1924 to produce the first vehicle which was shown at a parade in 7th of November, the AMO-F15. Nevertheless the factory sill managed to assemble trucks bought from Italy in 1917-1919. In April 30 1923 the factory was named after an Italian coummunist Pietro Ferrero, but in 1925 was renamed to First National Automobile Factory (Russian: 1-й Государственный автомобильный завод). 2 years later in 1927 Ivan Likhachov was appointed as a head of the factory, a person whose name the factory bears from 1956. In April 1929, it was agreed on to expand the plant to build Autocar 2.5-ton truck models.
Cadillac is among the first automobile brands in the world, second in the United States only to fellow GM marque Buick. The firm was founded from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company in 1902. It was named after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who founded Detroit, Michigan. The Cadillac crest is based on his coat of arms.
The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone (then called transmitter). This was independently developed around 1878 by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention.
On July 31, 1790 inventor Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont became the first person to be issued a patent in the United States. His patented invention was an improvement in the "making of Pot Ash by a new apparatus & process." These earliest patent law required that a working model of each invention be produced in miniature.
Harry (later Sir Harry) Ricardo was born in London in 1885 and was educated at Rugby and Cambridge where he studied at Trinity College. The first internal combustion engined cars were made by Daimler and Benz in the year of his birth and in his childhood days he was clearly highly influenced by these new forms of transport. He was renowned for his research into the problem of knock in engines; the results of his work on fuel and reducing fuel consumption assisted Alcock and Brown to cross the Atlantic for the first time by aircraft. Over the years, he was responsible for significant developments in the design of piston engines for a number of applications and derivatives of his original designs are still in production.
The Buick Model B was Buick's first model. It was built in Jackson, Michigan and was introduced in 1905 at the New York Auto Show. William C. Durant introduced the car himself at the exhibit, and took new car orders at the car show. It had a 2-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine – the world's first production OHV (overhead valve) engine – installed lengthwise within the frame, had a planetary transmission, with a cone clutch and two forward speeds and one reverse gear. The engine was rated at 21 bhp. In later years, it was renamed as improvements were made.
On July 31, 1790 inventor Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont became the first person to be issued a patent in the United States. His patented invention was an improvement in the "making of Pot Ash by a new apparatus & process." The earliest patent law required that a working model of each invention be produced in miniature.
As early as October 1923, the idea of an automobile championship was discussed at the annual autumn conference of the AIACR (Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus) in Paris. However, discussion centered on the increased interest in racing by manufacturers and holding the first European Grand Prix at Monza in 1923. The first World Championship took place in 1925, but it was for manufacturers only, consisting of four races of at least in length. The races that formed the first Constructors' Championship were the Indianapolis 500, the European Grand Prix, and the French and Italian Grands Prix. A European Championship, consisting of the major Grand Prix in a number of countries (named "Grandes Epreuves") was instituted for drivers in 1931, and was competed every year until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 with the exception of 1933 and 1934.
The carbon microphone was independently developed around 1878 by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention.
When NASCAR was first formed by France in 1948 to regulate stock car racing in the U.S., there was a requirement that any car entered be made entirely of parts available to the general public through automobile dealers. Additionally, the cars had to be models that had sold more than 500 units to the public. This is referred to as "homologation". In NASCAR's early years, the cars were so "stock" that it was commonplace for the drivers to drive themselves to the competitions in the car that they were going to run in the race. While automobile engine technology had remained fairly stagnant in World War II, advanced aircraft piston engine development had provided a great deal of available data, and NASCAR was formed just as some of the improved technology was about to become available in production cars. Until the advent of the Trans-Am Series in 1967, NASCAR homologation cars were the closest thing that the public could buy that was actually very similar to the cars that were winning national races.
The first car race in Michigan took place on October 10, 1901 between Henry Ford and Alex Winton. The race track was owned by the Detroit Driving Club of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. It had been built in 1894 as a race track for horses. Fifty years later, in the small summer resort town of Petoskey, Michigan, 300 miles north of Detroit, the Petoskey Motor Speedway was born. The northern speedway came during the time of America's new post World War II craze with jalopy stock car racing. It was the same era that Parnelli Jones rose to fame. The track was a one-quarter mile, banked, dirt speedway located on a farm field, just south of Petoskey. For four years, 1954 through 1958, thousands of summer tourists and residents of northern Michigan attended the weekly races from June through September.
In 1895 he successfully experimented with a water velocipede on the rivers Leine and Ihme near Hanover. As early as 1899 he exhibited a small car at the First International Exhibition in Berlin. Between 1901 and 1903 Wenkel travelled through East India, Java, Sumatra and Borneo, where he built the first Wenkelmobils in rather primitive conditions. When back in Germany, the Berlin factory of Schneider & Co started the production of his Wenkelmobil. Wenkel won numerous prizes with it in races in its small-car class. In 1906 and 1907 he travelled the length of South America down to Patagonia in a Wenkelmobil. He was officially commissioned to open up the Cordillera region for motor traffic, and also built flat-bottomed speed boats suitable for Argentine rivers. Wenkel acquired several patents, e.g. for the Wenkelmobil’s friction drive and a high-speed compression and vacuum pump. The Berlin Directory lists him as engineer and owner of a technical bureau and export firm during World War I. When well over sixty he won the prestigious Garbaty Trophy with his speedboat "Java II", in 1929. Three years later he was still making his mark with the invention of a "motor in a trunk car", a newfangled though unsuccessful miniature automobile. An article in a boys’ yearbook in 1943 suggests that Wenkel died in that year, but his precise date of death has yet to be confirmed.
Bill Colgan, founder of Colgan Custom Manufacturing, Inc. successfully operated a trim and upholstery business in Burbank, California, for fifteen years prior to creating the car bra business. The "Original Car Bra" was invented in 1961 when three German engineers from Lockheed walked into Bill's upholstery shop, asking Colgan if he could redesign a protective cover for their personal Porsches. The very first pattern was for the Porsche 356. The first order for the protective covers for the cars’ front fascia (a.k.a. ‘car bras’) was for 12 units. After that, he was asked to make 150. Yet, after the second order was given to the buyers, he stopped making car bras, in order to concentrate on the main business. And only by the mid-1970’s he realized that this business took over upholstery, and he concentrated on car bras production, having given this name to his invention. The pattern Colgan designed was the creation of the one-piece "Original Car Bra." The word 'bra' came from the woman's breast-support undergarment, the brassiere.
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.
Modern cruise control (also known as a speedostat or tempomat) was invented in 1948 by the inventor and mechanical engineer Ralph Teetor. His idea was borne out of the frustration of riding in a car driven by his lawyer, who kept speeding up and slowing down as he talked. The first car with Teetor's system was the 1958 Imperial (called "Auto-pilot") using a speed dial on the dashboard. This system calculated ground speed based on driveshaft rotations off the rotating speedometer-cable, and used a bi-directional screw-drive electric motor to vary throttle position as needed.
A 1955 U.S. Patent for a "Constant Speed Regulator" was filed in 1950 by M-Sgt Frank J. Riley. He installed his invention, which he conceived while driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, on his own car in 1948. Another inventor named Harold Exline, working independently of Riley, also invented a type of cruise control, which he first installed on his own car and on on cars belonging to friends of his. Exline filed a U.S. Patent for "Vacuum Powered Throttle Control With Electrically Controlled Air Valve" in 1951, and the Patent was granted in 1956. Despite these patents, Riley, Exline, and the subsequent patent holders were not able to collect royalties for any of the inventions using cruise control.
Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph, the first device for recording and playing back sound, in 1877. After patenting the invention and benefiting from the publicity and acclaim it received, Edison and his laboratory turned their attention to the commercial development of electric lighting, playing no further role in the development of the phonograph for nearly a decade. Edison's original phonograph recorded on sheets of tinfoil and was little more than a crude curiosity, although one that fascinated much of the public. These earliest phonographs were sold mainly to entrepreneurs who made a living out of traveling around the country giving "educational" lectures in hired halls or otherwise demonstrating the device to audiences for a fee. The tinfoil phonograph was not fit for any real practical use and public interest soon waned.
Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (5 February 1840 – 24 November 1916) was an American-born British inventor, best known as the creator of the Maxim gun, the first portable fully automatic machine gun. Maxim held patents on numerous mechanical devices such as a mousetrap, hair-curling irons, and steam pumps, and laid claim to inventing the lightbulb. He also experimented with powered flight but his large aircraft designs were never successful, however, his "Captive Flying Machine" amusement ride, designed as a means by which to fund his research while generating public interest in flight, was highly successful.
The John Stephenson Car Company was an American manufacturer of carriages, horsecars, cable cars, and streetcars, based in New York City. It was founded by John Stephenson in 1831. John Stephenson invented the first streetcar to run on rails, building this in 1832, for the New York and Harlem Railroad. A reorganization in 1867 included shortening of the company's name to the John Stephenson Company. In the latter part of the 19th century, the company was a major builder of streetcars, constructing some 25,000 cars in the period 1876–1891 alone, including ones for export.
Spyker is credited with building and racing the first ever four-wheel racing car in 1903. The first four-wheel-drive car, as well as hill-climb racer, with internal combustion engine, the "Spyker 60 H.P.", was presented in 1903 by Dutch brothers Jacobus and Hendrik-Jan Spijker of Amsterdam. The two-seat sports car, which was also the first ever car equipped with a six-cylinder engine, is now an exhibit in the Louwman Collection (the former "Nationaal Automobiel Museum") at the Hague in The Netherlands.
With the development of the U.S. railroad system, natural ice became used to transport larger quantities of goods much longer distances through the invention of the refrigerator car. The first refrigerator cars emerged in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and were crude constructions holding up to 3,000 lbs (1,360 kg) of ice, on top of which the food was placed. It was quickly found that placing meat directly on top of blocks of ice in cars caused it to perish; subsequent designs hung the meat from hooks, allowing the meat to breathe, while the swinging carcasses improved the circulation in the car. After the Civil War, J. B Sutherland, John Bate and William Davis all patented improved refrigerator cars, which used stacks of ice placed at either end and improved air circulation to keep their contents cool. This improved ventilation was essential to avoid warm air building up in the car and causing damage to the goods. Salt could be added to the ice to increase the cooling effect to produce an iced refrigerator car, which preserved foods even better. For much of the 19th century, the different gauges of train lines made it difficult and time consuming to move chilled cargoes between lines, which was a problem when the ice was continually melting; by the 1860s, refrigerator cars with adjustable axles were being created to speed up this process.
In 1885, Karl Benz developed a petrol or gasoline powered automobile. This is also considered to be the first "production" vehicle as Benz made several other identical copies. The automobile was powered by a single cylinder four-stroke engine.