Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was a French inventor. He is believed to have built the first self-propelled mechanical vehicle. 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 a ‘car’ around 1672.
Cugnot was born in Void, Lorraine, (now departement of Meuse), France. He trained as a military engineer. He experimented with working models of steam-engine-powered vehicles for the French Army, intended for transporting cannon, starting in 1765.
The first self-propelled vehicle.
Cugnot was one of the first to employ successfully a device for converting the reciprocating motion of a steam piston into rotary motion by means of a ratchet arrangement. A small version of his three-wheeled fardier à vapeur ran in 1769. (A fardier was a massively built two-wheeled horse-drawn cart for transporting very heavy equipment such as cannon barrels).
The first automobile accident.
The following year, a full-size version of the fardier à vapeur was built, specified to be able to carry 4 tons and cover 2 lieues (7.8 km or 4.8 miles) in one hour, a performance it never achieved in practice. The vehicle, which weighed about 2.5 tonnes tare, had two wheels at the rear and one in the front where the horses would normally have been; this front wheel supported the steam boiler and driving mechanism. The power unit was articulated to the “trailer” and steered from there by means of a double handle arrangement. The vehicle was reported to have been very unstable due to poor weight distribution — which would have been a serious disadvantage seeing that it was intended that the fardier should be able to traverse rough terrain and climb steep hills. In 1771, the second vehicle is said to have gone out of control and knocked down part of the Arsenal wall, (the first-known ‘automobile’ accident); however according to Georges Ageon, the earliest mention of this occurrence dates from 1801 and it does not feature in contemporary accounts. Boiler performance was also particularly poor, even by the standards of the day, with the fire needing to be relit and steam raised again every quarter of an hour or so, considerably reducing overall speed.
