by Vaclav Smil
Moreover, Diesel disliked to be engaged in the commercialization phase of his inventions, and he also judged many producers incapable of building his splendid machine properly. And like other inventors, he had to face the inevitable lawsuits contesting his invention, the first one already in 1897. Given the engine’s inherently higher mass/power ratio, its first applications were in stationary uses (pumps, oil drills) and in heavy transport. A French canal boat was the first diesel-powered ship in 1903; a French submarine followed in 1904. A small electricity-generating plant to supply streetcars in Kiev was commissioned in 1906, and the first ocean-going vessel with diesel engines was the Danish Selandia in 1912. The first diesel locomotive, with engines by Sulzer, was built in 1913 for the Prussian Hessian State Railways (Anonymous 1913a). Four cylinders placed in the locomotive’s center in 90° V configuration could sustain speed of 100 km/h. By that time there were more than 1,000 diesel engines in service, most of them rating 40–75 kW. A small diesel truck was built in 1908, but passenger diesel vehicles had to wait for Bosch’s injection pump.
In 1913 Johannes Lüders, a professor at the Technische Hochschule in Aachen, published his Dieselmythus, a work highly critical of Diesel’s accomplishments (Luders 1913). That attack, initially less than enthusiastic commercial acceptance of his engines, slow pace of developing them for the automotive market, prolonged anxiety and illness (including a nervous breakdown), excessive family spending and resulting financial problems—any one of these factors makes it most likely that Diesel’s disappearance was not an accident but a suicide. On September 29, 1913, he boarded a ship from Belgium to England, where he was to attend the opening of a new factory to produce his engines. Next morning he was not aboard the ship.
If Diesel had lived as long as Benz or Maybach (who died when 85 and 83 years old, respectively), he would have witnessed a universal triumph of his machine. Diesel’s conviction that his engine will eventually become a leading prime mover of road vehicles began to turn into reality just 10 years after his death. But his accomplishment was indisputable even without that achievement. As Suplee (1913:306) noted in a generous obituary, Diesel’s engine “is now known all over the world as the most efficient heat motor in existence, and the greatest advance in the generation of power from heat since the invention of the separate condenser by Watt.”
Creating Car Industry and Car Culture
The early history of car industry has inevitable parallels with the creation of an entirely new system for the generation, distribution, and conversion of electricity. In both instances, the early progress was slow as there were well-established alternatives relying on extensive service infrastructures: gas lighting and steam power in the case of electricity, and steam-powered trains for transport over longer distance and horse-drawn urban vehicles and newly introduced electric streetcars and trains in cities in the case of automobiles. This slow pace of diffusion and acceptance of automobiles is reflected by small numbers of vehicles in use in the United States. There were mere 300 of them in 1895; in 1900, 17 years after Daimler and Maybach built their first gasoline engine, the total was just 8,000, which means that only one of out of every 9,500 Americans owned a motor vehicle; and by 1905 the nationwide registration total stood at just short of 78,000 cars (USBC 1975).
Another telling way to demonstrate this reality is to note that during the 1890s the Scientific American, a leading source of information on technical advances, kept paying a great deal of attention to what were by that time only marginal improvements in steam engine design while its coverage of emerging car engineering was rather unenthusiastic. Similarly, Byrn’s (1900) systematic review of the 19th century inventions devoted only as many pages (7 out of 467) to automobiles as it did to bicycles. But there was also an obvious price difference: even relatively expensive early lights were much more affordable than the first-generation automobiles manufactured in small series by artisanal methods. And while electric lights and fans or irons were ready to use as soon as a household was connected to the central supply, driving on unpaved roads was difficult, and unreliability of early vehicle designs and a near complete absence of any emergency services turned these dusty (or muddy) trips into unpredictable adventures.
FIGURE 3.12. In the first year of the 20th century Punch carried many cartoons spoofing the new automotive experience. In the top image, a farmer calls, “Pull up, you fool! The mare’s bolting!” “So’s the car!” cries the motorist. The bottom left illustration shows “the only way to enjoy a motor-car ride through a dusty country,” and the bottom right is not “a collection of tubercular microbes escaping from the congress but merely the Montgomery-Smiths in their motor-car, enjoying the beauties of the country.” Reproduced from Punch issues of June 12, June 19, and July 31, 1901.
Three cartoons from Punch capture the essence of these experiences (figure 3.12). Travails of automotive pioneers of the 1890s were also vividly captured by Kipling’s recollection of “agonies, shames, delays, rages, chills, parboilings, road-walkings, water-drawings, burns and starvations” (quoted in Richardson 1977:27). And there were still other, unprecedented, concerns. Matter of the public safety was addressed for the first time in 1865 in relation to heavy steampowered traction by the justly ridiculed British legislature, which required that three people driving any “locomotives” on highways and the vehicles, traveling at the maximum speed of 6.4 km/h, be preceded by a man with a red flag (Rolls 1911). Incredibly, these restrictions were extended in 1881 to every type of self-propelled vehicle, and they were repealed only in 1896. No other country had such retarding laws, but concerns about the speed of new machines and about accidents were seen everywhere. At the same time, nothing could erase a growing feeling that something profoundly important was getting underway.
In November 1895, the opening editorial of the inaugural issue of American Horseless Age had no doubts that “a giant industry is struggling into being here. All signs point to the motor vehicle as the necessary sequence of methods of locomotion already established and approved. The growing needs of our civilization demand it; the public believe in it” (cited in Flink 1975:13). But first the slow, fragile, unreliable, and uncomfortable vehicles with obvious carriage and bicycle pedigrees had to evolve into faster, sturdier, reliable, and much more comfortable means of passenger transportation. Although European engineers had accomplished much of this transformation by the beginning of the 20th century, without mass production these technically fairly advanced vehicles would have remained beyond the reach of all but a small segment of populations. Henry Ford took that critical step beginning in 1908, so by 1914 the two factors that were so important in shaping the 20th century—car making as a key component of modern economies and car ownership as a key factor of modern life—were firmly in place.
Technical Challenges
Virtually unchallenged dominance that the road vehicles powered by internal combustion engines had enjoyed during the 20th century was achieved within a single generation after their first demonstrations—but their fate appeared unclear as late as 1900. Decades of experience with high-pressure steam engines made it possible to build some relatively light-weight machines that won a number of car races during the 1890s. Among new steam-powered machines that were designed after 1900 was Leon Serpollet’s beak-shaped racer that broke the speed record for 1 km with 29.8 s (equivalent to 120.8 km/h) in Nice in 1902, and Francis and Freelan Stanley’s steam car that set a new world speed record for the fastest mile (205.4 km/h) in 1906. But after that steam-powered passenger cars went into a rapid decline, although heavy commercial vehicles stayed around for several more decades (Flink 1988).
And Edison was far from being alone in believing that electric cars will prevail. Late 1890s and the first years of a new century looked particularly promising for those vehicles. In 1896, at the first U.S. track race at Narangansett Park in Rhode Island a Riker electric car decisively defeated a Duryea vehicle, and three years later in France another electric car, a bullet-shaped Jamais contente
driven by Camille Jenatzy, broke the 100 km/h barrier. And, of course, the electrics were clean and quiet, no high-pressure boilers and hissing hot steam, no dangerous cranking and refills with flammable gasoline.
Their commercial introduction began in 1897 with a dozen of Electric Carriage & Wagon Co.’s taxicabs in New York. In 1899 the U.S. production of electric cars surpassed 1,500 vehicles, compared to 936 gasoline-powered cars (Burwell 1990). Two years later Pope’s Electric Vehicle Co. was both the largest maker and the largest owner and operator of motor vehicles in the United States (Kirsch 2000). But its operations were soon reduced to just occasional rides in and around the Central Park, and by the end of 1907 it was bankrupt. The combination of technical improvements, ease of use, and affordability shifted the outcome in favor of gasoline-powered vehicles—although Edison, still stubbornly searching for a high power-density car battery, kept predicting that electric cars will eventually cost less to run.
There was no single component of engine and car design that remained unimproved. While fundamental operating principles remain intact even today, the first quarter-century of automotive engineering was remarkable not only for the breadth of its innovations but, once the machines ceased to be a curiosity and gained the status of an indispensable commodity, also for the rapidity with which important substitutions and improvements took place. First to be resolved was the problem of convenient steering. In horse carriages, the front axle with fixed wheels swiveled on a center pivot, and while it could be turned easily by a horse, it was a challenge for a driver. Benz avoided the problem by opting for a single front wheel governed by a tiller. But there was an effective old solution to front-wheel steering, Rudolph Ackermann’s 1818 invention that linked wheels by a rod so that they could move together while turning on independent pivots at the ends of a fixed front axle. England’s first gasoline car, built by Edward Butler in 1888, was the first four-wheeler with Ackermann steering, setting a standard for nearly all future vehicles.
As already noted, in 1891 Emile Levassor of the Parisian company Panhard & Levassor, originally makers of wood-working machinery, began to reconfigure the motorized vehicles pioneered by Benz, Daimler, and Maybach in a radical and enduring fashion (figure 3.13). He moved the engine from under the seats and placed it in front of the driver, a shift that placed the crankshaft parallel with the car’s principal axis rather than parallel with the axles and made it possible to install larger, more powerful engines, and that also led inevitably to the design of a protective, and later also aerodynamic, hood. The engine had a friction clutch and sliding-pinion gears, and he replaced the primitive leather drive belt with a chain drive.
As one of the founders of the most illustrious British car marque put it in his encyclopedic survey of motor vehicles, “with all the modifications of details, the combination of clutch, gear-box and transmission remains unaltered, so that to France, in the person of M. Levassor, must be given the honour of having led the development of the motor-car” (Rolls 1911:915–916). Subsequently, many particulars had to be improved or entirely redesigned in order to make this grand reconfiguration into a truly practical vehicle. Although the car had Ackermann steering, it was controlled by a long horizontal lever that was finally replaced by 1898 by modern wheel at the end of an inclined column.
FIGURE 3.13. Section of Panhard & Levassor 1894 car equipped with Daimler’s motor. A is the crankbox of the inclined cylinder, B the carburetor, and C the exhaust silencer. Gasoline flowed from D to E and F (ignition tube and mixture regulator). Three shifting wheels (L) were operated by the lever N. Reproduced from Beaumont (1902).
Even more important, ignition had to be made much less dangerous as well as much more reliable and efficient. The inherently risky open-flame hot tube was first replaced by low-voltage magnetos (generators producing a periodic electric pulse) whose design was improved in 1897 by Robert Bosch (1861–1942). Bosch’s magneto was successfully used for the first time in a de Dion-Bouton three-wheeler that was then able to reach an unprecedented speed of 50 km/h (Bosch GmbH 2003). The device was also adopted by DMG, and so more than a decade after Bosch set up his workshop for precision mechanics and electrical engineering (in 1886, after he returned from the United States where he worked briefly for Edison), his business was finally prospering. But the real breakthrough came in December 1901, when Gottlob Honold showed his employer a new high-voltage magneto with a new type of spark plug.
The patent was granted on January 7, 1902, and the timing could not have been better as the high-voltage magneto and spark plug that made high-speed engines possible became available just as the serial car production was finally taking off. Fouling was a recurrent problem with the early designs, but gradual improvements raised the life span of spark plugs to more than 25,000 km. Nickel and chromium were used until the 1970s; copper core was introduced during the early 1980s, and shortly afterward a center electrode was made of 99.9% platinum whose use allows for the maintenance of optimal operating temperature and for reaching the self-cleaning temperature within seconds (Bosch GmbH 2002; Kanemitsu 2001). In 1902 Bosch produced the total of about 300 spark plugs; a century later the worldwide annual production topped 350 million.
Various carburetor designs of early years eventually gave way to the spray-nozzle device, developed by Maybach in 1893, which became the basis for modern devices that introduce a fine jet of gasoline into the air that is entering a cylinder. Mechanical, cam-operated, inlet valves replaced the automatic (atmospheric) devices that opened late on the induction stroke and closed prematurely, thus resulting in a weakened charge. Renault was the first car maker to introduce the transmission that was directly connected to the engine: it had three forward and one reverse gear selected with a gear shift. Engine control switched from cutting out impulses to throttling, that is, to reducing the volume of fuel charged into a cylinder at one stroke.
The overall engine design benefited from a greater variety of new highperformance steel alloys whose use made cylinders, pistons, valves, and connecting rods both lighter and more durable, and engine performance was greatly enhanced by improvements in lubrication. Final chain transmission to wheels running on a fixed axle was replaced by propeller drive on a rotating axle. Four- and even six-cylinder cars (the latter arranged in V) eliminated the need for a substantial flywheel, while the honeycomb radiator, patented by DMG in 1900, doubled the efficiency of cooling, and a single lever became the standard for engaging both forward and reverse gears.
As in all initial stages of a prime mover’s development, installed power kept increasing not only in high-performance vehicles but also in cars designed for passenger transport. In 1904 Maybach completed the first six-cylinder Mercedes with 53 kW, and in 1906 he introduced a 90-kW race engine with overhead intake and exhaust valves and with dual ignition (DaimlerChrysler 2003). For comparison, today’s small passenger cars (Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla) rate typically between 79 and 90 kW, and larger family sedans (Honda Accord, Toyota Camry) have engines capable of 112–119 kW.
There were also innovations that made cars easier to start, to drive, and to service in emergencies. All early vehicles were started by turning a hand crank, a demanding and, not infrequently, a fairly dangerous task: a premature engine firing due to an advanced spark setting would rotate the starting crank violently, and it could easily break a wrist or a thumb. Early automakers tried to design self-starting engines with acetylene, compressed air, gasoline vapors, springs, and other mechanical contrivances (Bannard 1914). The solution arrived finally in 1911 when Charles Kettering, at his Dayton Engineering Laboratories (the company, now Delco Remy, continues to make starters and other electric parts for cars), succeeded in designing the first practical electric starter, for which he received a U.S. patent in 1915.
After satisfactory tests, General Motors ordered 12,000 units for all of its 1912 Cadillacs. Laborious hand cranking remained common on cheaper models, but by 1920 nearly every U.S. car was available with at least optional electric starting. The t
hree-speed and reverse gearbox (the H slot) that remains a standard in today’s passenger cars was first offered with a Packard in 1900, the year when Frederick Simms also built the first car fender (NAE 2000). Electric lights and electric horns gradually replaced paraffin and acetylene lanterns and bulb horns, and mechanically operated windshield wipers kept clean the first windows in semi-enclosed automobiles. Detachable wheels and a spare wheel were first introduced in the United Kingdom, as was the first speedometer (made in 1902 by Thorpe and Salter with the range of 0–35 mph or 0–55 km/h). The inflatable rubber tire, patented in the United Kingdom 1888 (also U.S. Patent 435,995 in 1890) by Scottish veterinary surgeon John Boyd Dunlop (1840–1921) and almost immediately used on newly popular bicycles, was superior to the solid one, but as it was glued solidly to the wheel rim, it was not easily repaired.
The first detachable rubber tire was produced by Michelin brothers, Andre (1853–1931) and Edouard (1859–1940), in 1891. The older brother studied engineering and architecture, and the younger one painting, but both returned home to manage their small family business in Clermont-Ferrand, which they eventually transformed into a very successful multinational corporation (Michelin 2003). Their tire enabled Charles Terront to win the Paris—Brest—Paris bicycle race despite a puncture. As no manufacturer was ready to fit its cars with Michelin tires, the brothers used a Peugeot body and a Daimler engine to enter their own vehicle in the 1895 Paris—Bordeaux race: the Eclairs tires had to be changed every 150 km, but the car finished the race in 9th place (Michelin 2003).