The Beginnings Of The automobile

Etymology and premises

Although early models have emerged a few years earlier, the word "car" itself is forged in 1875 when the French Academy decides on its gender, male here. However, in 1901, she endorses the use of Female. The term "automobile" is rarely used in the language courantNote 1, and was replaced by the term "vehicle" or "car". Paradoxically, vehicles initially designate mobile machinery powered by an external force, in particular by chevaux.

If we stick to the etymology of the word automobile, "which moves itself," it would be a small steam-powered vehicle built by Ferdinand Verbiest in the palace of the Emperor of China in Beijing around 1668 , who first fills this condition. This vehicle, viewed as more of a toy consists of a kettle attached to a small furnace and equipped with a paddle wheel, and gear wheels. He describes how in the book Astronomia Europa 1668.

More anecdotally, some see Codice Atlantico publications of Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century, the first study of a car without chevaux. Prior to Vinci, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, engineer of the Renaissance, this drawing in his notebooks remarkable known as the "automobile", vaguely resembling a four roues.