Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
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Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (26 February 1725 – 2 October 1804) was a French inventor who is claimed by the French government to have built the first self-propelled mechanical vehicle or automobile.[1] This claim is disputed by various sources which suggest that Ferdinand Verbiest, as a member of a Jesuit mission in China, may have built the first steam-powered car around 1672.[2][3]
Cugnot was born in Void, Meuse, Lorraine. He trained as a military engineer. He experimented with working models of steam-engine-powered vehicles for the French Army, intended for hauling heavy cannons, starting in 1765.
Cugnot seems to have been the first to convert the back-and-forth motion of a steam piston into rotary motion. A functioning version of his three-wheeled "Fardier à vapeur" ("Steam wagon") ran in 1769. The following year, he built an improved version. His vehicle was said to have been able to pull 4 tons and travel at speeds of up to 4 km per hour (3 mph). The heavy vehicle had two wheels in the back and one in the front, which supported the steam boiler and was steered by a tiller. In 1771, his vehicle crashed into a brick wall, the first known automobile accident. The accident, together with budget problems, ended the French Army's experiment with mechanical vehicles, but in 1772, King Louis XV granted Cugnot a pension of 600 francs a year for his innovative work.
With the French Revolution, Cugnot's pension was withdrawn in 1789, and the inventor went into exile in Brussels, where he lived in poverty. Shortly before his death, he was invited back to France by Napoleon Bonaparte. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot returned to Paris, where he died on October 2, 1804.
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's 1770 machine is preserved in Paris's Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Le fardier de Cugnot.
- ^ SA MOTORING HISTORY - TIMELINE. Government of South Australia.
- ^ Setright, L. J. K. (2004). Drive On!: A Social History of the Motor Car. Granta Books. ISBN 1-86207-698-7.
[edit] References
- Max J. B. Rauck, Cugnot, 1769-1969: der Urahn unseres Autos fuhr vor 200 Jahren, München: Münchener Zeitungsverlag, 196
[edit] External links
- Cugnot on 3wheelers.com with picture of the Steam Tractor
- Replica at the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum
- Hybrid-Vehicle.org: The Steamers
- Le fardier de Cugnot: page in French about Cugnot and his invention, hosted at an Île-de-France regional government web site and credited to the Société des Ingénieurs de l'Automobile (Society of Automotive Engineers).
