Cugnot's Car

 

 

 

The 1700s were dominated by various inventors working to perfect the steam engine - Thomas Newcomen and James Watt are probably the most famous of these, but there were many more. But the first person to take a steam engine and place it on a full-sized vehicle was probably a Frenchman named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, who between 1769 and 1771 built a steam-powered automobile more than thirty years before the railway's first steam locomotive.

Cugnot's design was, to put it mildly, unique. The contraption weighed about 2.5 tons, had two big wheels in the back and a single thick central wheel at the front, and could seat four people. The boiler was placed well out in the front, which made the vehicle even more fiendishly difficult to control. While its top speed was meant to be about five miles per hour, it never even got close to that fast in practice.