Gwatney Collision Center

The Cugnot Steam Trolley Chugged Through the 1700s

Many aren’t aware that the first working self-propelled land-based vehicle—the world’s first automobile—was invented more than 100 years before the Ford Model T and the curved dash Oldsmobile. It was the 1769 Cugnot Steamer designed by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot. 

Here are some historical facts from Gwatney Collision Center about this vehicle that eventually led to the gasoline car.

Some say the first steam-powered vehicle was developed by Ferdinand Verbiet, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, in 1672. However, it is unclear whether it was even built and most accounts credit Cugnot for building the first vehicle of this type.  

Born in 1725, in Void-Vacon, Lorraine, France, Cugnot was a French inventor and trained as a military engineer. He became a French Army captain and began looking into the possibility of steam-powered vehicles for the French Army in 1765. The French Minister of War, Etienne-Francois, commissioned the project and the goal was to find a way to transport artillery.

Cugnot developed a small three-wheel steam-powered vehicle in 1969 known as the fardier à vapeur ("steam dray"). A fardier was a huge two-wheeled horse-drawn cart that moved heavy equipment.

There were two wheels in back and rather than a horse in front, there was another wheel that was used for both steering and driving. Some say it looked like a huge tricycle. A year later, a full-size version was built that could carry five tons.

According to reports, it was designed for four passengers and could travel at a walking pace of 2.25 miles per hour.

It took another 115 years before automobiles really took off after the internal combustion engine was developed by Gottlieb Daimler.

Five facts about the first self-propelled vehicle:

• The engine used steam power to move two pistons without condensation, which improved efficiency. Cugnot was said to be the first to successfully use a ratchet arrangement to convert the reciprocal motion of a steam piston into a rotary motion.
• Due to its weight distribution, the vehicle was known to have been very unstable and did not have brakes.
• Every 15 minutes, the fire had to be relighted and the steam raised, which reduced the speed of the vehicle.
• After the project was abandoned in 1771, Cugnot received a pension of 600 livres per year for his work from King Louis XV in 1772. It was withdrawn in 1789 during the French Revolution and Cugnot went into exile in Brussels. Napoleon Bonaparte asked him to come back to Paris, France prior to Cugnot’s death in 1804.
• The fardier was kept at the Paris Arsenal until 1800 when it was taken to the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in Paris, where it still is today.

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Sources: USA Today, Japolik and Wikipedia