Greatest ever inventions & inventors in the car world

Inventions are extremely important.

Right now, there are clever people all over the world working at creating an antibody test for Covid-19 that actually works, and a vaccine to the disease too. Both of which will allow the world to get going again.

While we look forward to them, how did inventions impact our world of cars? The modern car is an accumulation of inventions from both the distant and recent past, and is made of many parts.

Each of these parts had to be invented by somebody because machinery does not evolve on its own. As motoring history has progressed and cars have become increasingly complicated, more parts have been required, and that in turn means more inventors.

Some have been forgotten. The identity of others has been disputed. In extreme cases, so many people invented roughly the same thing at roughly the same time that it’s almost impossible to tell who came first. What follows is a list of who we believe were the true pioneers of the automotive age:

Christiaan Huygens

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) was a major figure in the scientific explosion of the 17th century. The brilliant Dutchman improved the telescope, proposed a wave theory of light and greatly advanced the accuracy of timekeeping by inventing the pendulum clock.

Huygens was also the first person to realise that the planet Saturn was surrounded by rings, and one of several who investigated dividing the musical octave into 31 notes rather than the usual 12. He died nearly two centuries before the motor industry began, but invented an early example of a device which would later be used in nearly all cars.

Internal combustion engine

In 1678, Huygens designed (though probably didn’t build) a machine in which exploding gunpowder sent a piston up a tube and a combination of gravity and vacuum sent it back down with great force – enough, it was said, to lift eight boys holding a rope attached to the piston clear off the ground.

A second cycle required more gunpowder, presumably added after heat created by the first explosion had been given time to dissipate. The device would therefore never be practical for a car, but it was beyond question an internal combustion engine.

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot: first self-propelled vehicle

If not exactly a car, the fardier à vapeur, or steam dray, created by French army engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (1725-1804) is at least generally accepted as the first passenger vehicle capable of moving under its own power.

Cugnot made a small version in 1769 and a full-sized one the following year, both with a single steam-driven wheel at the front and two undriven ones at the rear. Two replicas have been built in the 21st century in Paris and Tampa Bay, Florida.

François Isaac de Rivaz

Paris-born François Isaac de Rivaz (1752-1828) inherited a love of invention from his father Pierre Joseph (1711-1772), whose work included the development of a perpetual clock powered by changes in air pressure and temperature.

François Isaac was very well educated and qualified both as a surveyor and as a notary before taking up work for the Swiss canton of Valais. His most famous invention foreshadowed developments in the world of motoring.

Car with internal combustion engine

De Rivaz constructed a working scale model of a self-propelled wheeled vehicle in 1807 and later built a full-sized one which, according to reports, transported four people for 26 metres at slightly below walking pace.

Fuel for its engine consisted of a hydrogen-oxygen mix. The project was soon abandoned because the dirtier but more efficient steam power seemed to be the way forward. Nevertheless, de Rivaz had created the first land vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. Nicéphore Niépce had a similar idea slightly earlier, but his vehicle was a boat.

Nikolaus Otto

While working in the imported foods trade, Nikolaus Otto (1832-1891) became fascinated with engines, and began building them in 1861. The one which made him famous was constructed in 1876.

It used a principle, devised earlier by Alphonse Beau de Rochas (1815-1893), of compressing a fuel-air mixture before igniting it. De Rochas realised, and Otto quickly understood, that this would greatly improve an engine’s thermal efficiency and allow it to produce more power.

The four-stroke Otto cycle

A ‘stroke’ is the movement of a piston up or down a cylinder. In a four-stroke engine, the first stroke draws in fuel and air which is compressed in the second and ignited at the start of the third. Exhaust is expelled in the fourth.

Known as the Otto cycle, or more informally “suck, squeeze, bang, blow”, it is the basis of how nearly every car engine works. James Atkinson (1846-1914) came up with an even more efficient design, but when manufacturers say nowadays that they use the Atkinson cycle they are referring to a modified version of the Otto cycle.

Robert Hooke

For many years Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) also did important work in gravity, microscopy, paleontology, astronomy and timekeeping. He assisted Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) in rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, was the first person to use the word ‘cell’ as a biological term and found the law of elasticity, making it possible to understand the behaviour of car springs.

Hooke was good friends with Wren and other contemporary scientists but fell out with several more, including Sir Isaac Newton. The two men had similar ideas about gravity, but only Newton had the mathematical skill to describe it properly.

Constant-velocity joint

A constant-velocity joint, more often referred to in the motor industry as a CV joint, allows two shafts to turn at equal speeds even though they are joined at an angle.

It is sometimes described (though rarely by car mechanics) as a Hooke joint because the first example was invented by Hooke for use in a mechanical sundial in 1675. CV joints used in car transmissions are different in detail from Hooke’s but use the same principle.

Robert William Thomson

Born in Stonehaven in north-east Scotland, a few miles south of Aberdeen, Robert William Thomson (1822-1873) was an engineer and inventor who produced many useful devices including a road-going steam vehicle, a self-filling fountain pen, and a method of setting off explosives from a safe distance with an electric charge.

In a wide-ranging career, he was involved in the early development of railways and also worked as an engineer on a sugar plantation in Java.

Pneumatic tyre

Thomson is much less well-known than he should be for inventing and patenting the pneumatic tyre in his early 20s. Known as the ‘aerial wheel’, it was shown to improve the comfort and reduce the noise levels of horse-drawn carriages, but it was nevertheless an idea ahead of its time.

Fellow Scot John Boyd Dunlop (1840-1921) usually gets the credit because he independently had the same idea much later, when rubber technology had improved and bicycling had become popular. There is no doubt that Dunlop was an ingenious man whose name is on car tyres to this day, but in terms of the pneumatic tyre Thomson got there first.

Nicholas Callan

Nicholas Callan (1799-1864) of County Louth in Ireland was a priest with a fascination for science. His particular interest was electricity, which led him to build a huge battery and a phenomenally strong electromagnet.

Callan also speculated that an electric vehicle could be as powerful as one powered by steam, and cheaper to run. Few people would disagree with this nowadays, but Callan was unable to demonstrate it.

Induction coil

Despite heading in approximately the right direction, Callan did not invent the electric car, but he was a pioneer in the development of the induction coil, which converts a low-voltage supply into a spark strong enough to ignite a fuel/air mixture. Diesel cars do not need them, but they are essential in modern petrol-engined ones.

Pierre Giffard

Born in Normandy, Pierre Giffard (1853-1922) spent most of his working life as a journalist in Paris. Parisian newspapers often boosted circulation by organising sporting events, so Giffard found himself in the position of creating races for runners and cyclists, as well as one of a different kind which would make motoring history.

Motorsport

Although some unsuccessful events were held earlier, it’s reasonable to say that the first properly organised motorsport competition was the Paris-Rouen road race of 1894, organised on behalf of Le Petit Journal by its editor Giffard. Jules-Albert de Dion was the fastest competitor but was disqualified because his steam car (pictured) required the services of a stoker and was therefore more difficult to drive than the rules permitted.

Giffard and de Dion would later clash over the the Dreyfus Affair. As a result, de Dion co-created the newspaper L’Auto, which organised the first Tour de France cycle race in 1903.

Herbert John Dowsing: starter motor

The Arnold company of Kent built Benzes under licence from 1896 to 1898. In the first of these years, one of them was fitted with a starter motor by electrical engineer Herbert John Dowsing (1859-1931). It took away the effort and mild physical danger of using a crank to turn the engine over, but did not become a regular part of motoring life until the 1920s.

It would be reasonable to credit Dowsing for inventing two things at once. His motor didn’t just start the engine; it also provided extra power for driving uphill, making that particular Arnold a very example of a hybrid car.

Ransom Eli Olds

Ransom Eli Olds (1864-1950) was an American motor industry pioneer who founded two car companies. The first, founded in 1897, built cars under the name Oldsmobile, a brand which survived as part of General Motors until 2004.

Ejected from that one by footballer and businessman Frederic Smith (1870-1954), he set up another called REO, a name formed by his three initials but pronounced as a single word. This is in contrast to the rock band REO Speedwagon, which is named after one of Olds’ REO trucks from 1915 but has those letters pronounced individually. After several mergers, the rights to the REO name is today held by Sweden’s Volvo Group.

Assembly line production

Olds was the first person to use an assembly line in a car factory. The Oldsmobile Curved Dash manufactured between 1901 and 1907 was therefore the first mass-produced car.

Henry Ford (1863-1947) improved on this idea by using a moving assembly line (where the cars moved from one worker to the next, not the other way round) for the Model T. It was undoubtedly a more efficient system, but in this respect Olds was the true pioneer.

Bertha Benz

Bertha Benz (1849-1944) knew far less about building cars than her husband Karl (1844-1929) but had a much better instinct about marketing them. Without his knowledge, she and their sons Eugen and Richard took his Patent-Motorwagen on a trip to visit her mother in 1888.

The journey from the German cities of Mannheim to Pforzheim and back was around 120 miles, an enormous undertaking in those days and certainly the first ever long-distance journey by car. It brought the Benzes – and the car – a great deal of publicity, and almost by accident established Bertha as one of motoring’s first test drivers.

Brake linings

Bertha discovered several ways of improving the car on her famous journey. One of the most significant concerned the brakes, which were in the form of wooden blocks applied to the metal rear tyres by a lever. The wood quickly began to wear out, so Bertha asked a cobbler to cover the blocks in leather, thereby inventing the concept of brake linings.

She also performed mechanical repairs (clearing a clogged fuel line with a hat pin and rather daringly using a garter to insulate a failing ignition wire) and reported to Karl that a lower gear was required for tackling steep hills. She also stopped at a chemist to fill up (pictured), thus also inventing the world’s first petrol station.

George Schebler: cylinder deactivation

Shutting down some of an engine’s cylinders to improve its fuel economy may seem like a new idea, but the basic principle was created by George Schebler (1865-1942). Better known as a designer of carburettors, he also built the first car ever fitted with a V12 engine in 1908.

Unlike modern cars with cylinder deactivation, this one was intended to run on just six of its cylinders on good roads. Use of all 12 was required only to help it pull through sand or deep mud.

Earl Avery Thompson

Born in Oregon, Earl Avery Thompson (1891-1967) studied mechanical and electrical engineering and devoted much of his working life to improving car transmissions.

Gear changing was quite an art in the early days, since without careful use of the accelerator it was all too easy to create an almighty crunch every time you moved from one gear to the next. Over a period of twenty years, Thompson developed three ways of avoiding this, all of which can be found in cars being sold today.

Synchromesh

Thompson’s invention of synchromesh in 1918 made it possible for even the most inexperienced driver to change gears without crunching simply by moving the lever into the correct place and not worrying about engine speed. The motor industry took a while to see the value in this, but Thompson eventually made his fortune by selling the patents to General Motors.

He later became a GM employee, developing a semi-automatic gearbox which appeared in the 1937 Buick Special and then the world’s first mass-produced fully automatic transmission, which first appeared in the Oldsmobile range for the 1940 model year branded as Hydra-Matic Drive.

Thomas Sturtevant: automatic transmission

Thomas Sturtevant worked for the family company which has made milling machines since 1883 and still does today. In 1904 he moved briefly into the automotive field, building the first car with an automatic gearbox.

It wasn’t successful, so Sturtevant left others – principally Earl Thompson - to develop the idea and went back to his mills.

John Hetrick: airbags

Although two Birmingham dentists, Harold Round and Arthur Parrott, were awarded a patent for an aeroplane airbag in 1920, it was John Hetrick (1918-1999), an engineer from Pennsylvania, who developed a system for cars after a road accident involving his wife and daughter.

The accident wasn’t serious, but Hetrick was all too aware it could have been much worse. He was granted a patent for his idea, which he called a ‘safety cushion assembly for automotive vehicles’, in 1953. Modern airbags are more sophisticated but work on the same principle. The first production car to receive an airbag was the 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado.

Rudolf Diesel

Born in Paris to a German family, Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913) studied engineering and became fascinated by the idea of improving engine efficiency. Shortly before World War I he disappeared from a ship sailing across the North Sea from Antwerp to London for reasons which are still unknown more than a century later.

Diesel engine

Diesel built the first successful engine to his own design in 1897. Herbert Akroyd-Stuart (1864-1927) had a similar ‘hot bulb’ engine running a few years earlier, but there were significant differences, and that engine is now considered to be a predecessor of the diesel rather than the real thing.

Diesel engines developed a reputation for being economical but noisy, smelly and not very powerful. They later became very popular in Europe through a combination of improved technology (including turbocharging) and tax laws which favoured cars with low CO2 outputs. This popularity has since faded due to scandals involving manufacturers cheating on emissions tests.

Francis Davis

Francis Davis (1887-1978) was an engineer at Pierce-Arrow, whose products included both luxury cars and trucks, when he came up with the idea for which he is best known. He later set up a business with machinist George Jessup and spent more than a quarter of a century trying to convince the US motor industry that it was worth considering.

Hydraulic power steering

Attempts to make the steering of many types of vehicles easier began in the 19th century. Davis was the first to make it work. His power steering system was hydraulic, by far the most popular method in motoring history though not the only one. It was ready to go in 1925 but was not available in a mainstream production car until the launch of the 1951 Chrysler Imperial. Until then, only strong people could drive big vehicles.

Alfred Büchi

In 1905 the most obvious way of improving the power of an engine you had was to throw it away and build a larger one. Alfred Büchi (1879-1959), who had graduated from a university in Zurich only two years earlier, was unsatisfied with this, and looked for a way to make engines more efficient.

The method he found is used very widely today. It increases power outputs by a large margin and also allows manufacturers to build small but strong engines which perform very well in official fuel economy and exhaust emission tests. Büchi realised that exhaust gases could be used to drive a turbine which would compress air going into the other end of the engine and allow it to produce much more power. This was a form of supercharging, a term which covers any form of forcing more air into an engine than it could inhale without assistance.

Because a turbine was involved, Büchi’s idea came to be known as turbocharging, a much more evocative term than the strictly accurate ‘exhaust gas-driven supercharging’. Involving less power loss than an engine-driven compressor, it was a brilliant notion, but was not taken up until the 1920s.

Eugene Houdry

An engineer, a racing driver and a decorated World War I hero, Eugene Houdry (1892-1962) became fascinated by the subject of creating and improving fuel. In the process he also became an expert in the subject of catalysts. Disappointed by a lack of interest in his home country of France, he emigrated to the US in 1930.

Catalytic convertor

In the early 1950s, Houdry became concerned about the unhealthy effects of exhaust gases. In 1956 he was granted a patent for a catalytic convertor which reduced levels of carbon monoxide and unburnt hydrocarbons. Convertors could not tolerate the presence of lead, so it wasn’t until lead was removed from petrol, long after Houdry’s death, that their use became universal.

Adolphe Kégresse

Adolphe Kégresse (1879-1943) spent ten years working - partly as a chauffeur - for Tsar Nicholas II in Russia. While he was there, he invented the Kégresse track, a tank-like system which replaces the rear wheels of a normal vehicle and makes it far more manoeuvrable in rough or soft ground.

Back home in France, he worked for Citroën, which produced Kégresse track vehicles in the 1920 and 1930s. They were very effective, but to say the least the system was not required by the great majority of the motoring public.

Dual-clutch transmission

Another Kégresse invention, from 1935, is much better known. The dual-clutch transmission divides a car’s gears into two sets and gives each of them an automatic clutch. A car fitted with it is as easy to drive as a conventional automatic but is much more efficient, providing better performance, fuel economy and CO2 emissions.

DCTs were used in motorsport by Audi and Porsche in the 1980s, but the first series production road car fitted with one was the 2003 Volkswagen Golf R32. Most major manufacturers now offers DCTs – generally bought in from specialist transmission builders – in their product ranges.

Earle MacPherson: MacPherson strut

A MacPherson strut carries a spring and shock absorber, and the top of it is the highest mounting point in a suspension system. Although there are some minor geometrical problems, it is a very common arrangement because it is relatively cheap and simple, and can be packaged easily.

Illinois-born Earle MacPherson (1891-1960) devised it for a 1940s Chevrolet prototype which never made it to production. He then left GM to join Ford, and it accordingly was used first in the 1950 Ford Consul (pictured) and not, as is sometimes claimed, in the later Simca Vedette.

Ralph Teetor

Losing his sight in an accident at the age of five was an advantage as far as Ralph Teetor (1890-1982) (pictured on the right) was concerned, since it allowed him to imagine solutions in a way that sighted people could not. His best idea was reputedly inspired by his patent lawyer’s frustrating inability to maintain a constant speed when driving, motions he was more aware of due to his disability.

Cruise control

Teetor invented a system which enabled a car to hold its speed the way his lawyer couldn’t. The idea wasn’t new, but Teetor made it work better than anyone else. Chrysler was the first to take it up, making it available in the 1958 Imperial, and other manufacturers soon followed. Adaptive cruise control (pictured) and autonomous motoring both rely to some extent on Teetor’s work.

Nils Bohlin

In his early 20s, Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin (1920-2002) helped developed an ejector seat which would hurl people out of Saab aeroplanes. He is now better remembered for a completely different system which would keep them safe inside Volvo cars.

Three-point seatbelts

Seatbelts existed before Bohlin came along, but they were of the lap-strap type which does little to help anyone survive a car accident. Bohlin’s great idea was to extend the strap and make it cross over one of the occupant’s shoulders as well as their lap. The three-point lap-and-diagonal arrived in 1959 and is widely believed to have saved many thousands of lives.

Bohlin won several awards for and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame for his safety work. He retired as Senior Engineer at Volvo in 1985.

Stephanie Kwolek

A child of Polish immigrants, Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) was born in Pennsylvania and intended to become a doctor. She accepted what she thought would be a temporary job at the DuPont chemical company in 1946 and stayed there for 40 years.

Kevlar

At DuPont, Kwolek developed an extraordinarily strong and lighter fibre which was initially used in the construction of car tyres. The base material appeared to be a waste product but turned out, when Kwolek asked a technician to test it, to be immensely strong for its weight. Kwolek and her team spent several years refining it, and what is now known as Kevlar became available in 1971.

Since its introduction in the 1960s it has turned out to have many more uses than improving tyre construction. Other motoring applications include brake pads, clutches, body parts of competition and high-performance road cars, and protective clothing for motorcyclists. Applications beyond include body armour for the police and military, and sails for racing yachts.

Jim Moylan: fuel gauge arrow

Ford engineer Jim Moylan is credited with the simple but brilliant idea of adding a painted arrow to a fuel gauge to show which side of the car the filler is on. It came to him when he took a new company car to a petrol station, guessed the filler position incorrectly and ended up on the wrong side of the pump.

Ford took up the idea in 1989 and some other manufacturers followed, but there are still people who do not know what the arrow is for. Those who do find it very useful when fuelling an unfamiliar car for the first time, or the just plain forgetful.

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