Obama's automotive history rewrite
- From: jose el fontanero <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:36:31 -0800 (PST)
Obama's automotive history rewrite
by Mark Silva
This had to be music to the ears of Detroit:
"I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away
from it,'' President Barack Obama said in his address to a joint
session of Congress last night.
His point: That while "everyone recognizes that years of bad decision-
making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the
brink... we should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad
practices. But we are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-
imagined auto industry that can compete and win.''
The only problem is, this nation did not invent the automobile.
The French claim credit to the predecessor of the modern auto - a
steam-powered vehicle built by Nicolas Cugnot in 1771. Another
Frenchman, Amedee Bollee, built a 12-passenger steam car in 1873.
The real breakthrough came from Germany, where Gottlieb Daimler and
Wilhelm Maybach built a two-cylinder, gasoline engine-powered car and
Karl Benz built gas-powered cars in the mid to late 1880s.
Daimler had invented the prototype of the modern gas engine, with a
vertical cylinder, in 1885, and with gas injected through a carburetor
(patented in 1887). Benz patented his gas-fueled car in 1886, Daimler
built a four-stroke engine with two V-slant cylinders in 1889 and
Maybach built the first four-cylinder, four-stroke in 1890.
John Lambert is credited with the first American-built gas-powered
car, in 1891.
In 1893, brothers Charles and Frank Duryea built and successfully
tested their first car on the public streets of Springfield,
Massachusetts. Charles Duryea founded the Duryea Motor Wagon Company
in 1896, the first U.S. company to manufacture and sell gasoline
powered vehicles. By 1896, the company had sold 13 of the model
Duryea, an expensive limousine, which remained in production into the
1920s.
It took the Americans, however, to mass produce vehicles that had been
limited to a privileged few -- and this is the historical feat worth
acknowledging. In 1901, Ransom Olds manufactured a Curved Dash
Oldsmobile.
Then Henry Ford, who had built his first gas-powered car in 1896, put
an assembly line to work turning out Model Ts in 1908. He built 18
million.
The steam car was relegated to museums, though many were built well
into the 1900s. The descendants of Daimler and Benz made a really bad
investment in Chrysler. And the Americans basically missed the boat on
the next practical iteration of the automobile, the "hybrid'' electric
and gas-powered vehicles, but now the U.S. is playing catch-up on
hybrids and hoping to leapfrog the competition on the next wave, the
electric car.
The nation may not be able to "walk away'' from the automobile, but
it's probably going to have to walk away from the kind it's been
building for decades.
.
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