This paper provides great information about the history of the car. Information is provided about steam powered automobile, electric cars and internal combustion engines. Then some information is provided about the history of Fords Motors and General Motors that are unbeatable names in the field of automobiles. Then some information is provided about the impact of cars on humanity. How cars have changed the landscape of the nations is explained. Introduction European engineers had started working on motor powered vehicles by the end of 1700s.
Different types of four wheel vehicles were developing including steam powered cars, combustion cars and electric cars. These cars had been invented near the mid of 1800s. But it was not known by the 1900s about the type of engine that will be able to power the automobile. Initially, the electric car was considered as the most effective car but the electric car required a battery. At that time such a battery was not invented that would be able to move the vehicle with higher speed and to take the vehicle over a longer distance. Then the most popular and effective engine was invented.
It was the combustion engine. Highly reliable combustion engine was built that had kicked off the other less effective competitors such as electric and steam engines. Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford are considered as the American automobile pioneers of combustion engine. Commercial production of automobiles began in different years in different countries. France had started producing automobiles commercially in 1890 where as Europe and United States of American started producing automobile on commercial scale since the beginning of the 1900s. European automobile industry was not very well developed.
It was consisted of several small firms that were running independently. These firms were producing very few cars with the help of handicraft methods and precise engineering. American automobile industry also did not have a completely developed structure. Manufacturing of parts was not done at the industry. Rather, parts were purchased from independent suppliers and then the plants at the American automobile industry had assembled them to bring them in the form of a car. Approximately 2000 independent firms were producing one or more cars in the United States in the early 1900s.
This number of firms had decreased to 100 by 1920 and then to 44 in 1929. The same changed had occurred about the independent firms in Japan and Europe. Invention of Steam Powered Automobile Automobile invention was not a very procedure. It was a revolution that was found throughout the world. Modern automobile has been created with the help of more than 100,000 patents. Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci were the first the start the theoretical plan to invent a motor vehicle. Nicolas Joseph Cugnot was the first who had invented the first road vehicle that was able to propel itself on the road independently.
This invention was a military truck and it was invented in 1769. Nicolas Joseph Cugnot was a French engineer. In his invention, the vehicle had a steam engine. The French Army had used this vehicle to drag artillery with a speed of 2. 5 mph. This vehicle was not able to run on the road without interruption. It required stop at every ten to fifteen minutes to resume steam power. This vehicle had boiler and steam engine separately placed in the front of the vehicle. This engine was able to move by burning fuel. The burnt fuel was used to heat up water in a boiler and thus steam was created.
This steam was used to push and expand pistons whose function was to turn the crankshaft and thus turning the wheels. As a very heavy weight was loaded on the steam powered vehicles so these vehicles were not very successful but they had been used in locomotives. So it can be said that Nicolas Cugnot was the first engineer who had invented the first automobile of the world. Invention of Electric Cars The first electric carriage was invented by Robert Anderson of Scotland in the year between 1832 and 1839. In this vehicle, rechargeable batteries were used whose function was to supply power to a small electric motor.
The electric automobiles were also not highly successful because of their heavy weight, slow speed and high cost. These vehicles also needed stops so that the batteries can be charged up frequently. So it can be said that both electric and steam powered vehicles did not gain much success and the invention of gas powered vehicle had kicked them out of the market. Invention of Internal Combustion Engine An explosive combustion of fuel is required in an internal combustion engine that is used for pushing a piston present in a cylinder.
As the piston moves, a crankshaft is turned through which the car wheels are turned with the help of a drive shaft or a chain. Car combustion engines use different types of fuels such as kerosene, gasoline and diesel. History of Ford Motors To most Americans, auto manufacture was still a cottage industry, and Ford was but one among 89 American manufacturers calling themselves car companies that year, most of them short-lived. The first advertisement for an American car (Oldsmobile) had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post only 17 months before. Ford’s first product was the Model A, soon to be followed by the B, C and F.
But these were not exactly the cheap, mass-produced workhorses that made the company’s fortune. The Model B, priced at $2,000, had an engine that could crack 91 mph on a racetrack. And it was on raceways that automobiles and their builders made their reputations in the days before it occurred to them that the cars might need to be marketed. From the beginning, Ford advertising existed on two levels. Dealers, as they began to appear, assumed much of the front-line selling through local newspaper ads. Ford itself, however, saw no need to have an ad department or staff.
At the corporate level, advertising became another task assigned to business manager James Couzens, who hired the company’s first ad shops-the Charles H. Fuller Agency and O. J. Mulford Advertising Co. During its first year in business, Ford spent about $13,500 through its agencies. It also bought ads directly, and that became its preferred method. According to bookkeeping records after 1904 examined by University of Michigan history professor David L. Lewis, Ford had no further agency relationships for the next five years, when JWT was hired for a two-year stint.
Fiscal 1905 saw ad spending reach $39,513, but it dropped sharply when former circus advance man E. LeRoy Pelletier became Ford’s first ad manager in 1907. Before leaving less than a year later, he put the company on a diet of inexpensive small-space ads and gave Ford its first great marketing manifesto. In October 1908, Mr. Ford unveiled his masterpiece. It was a new design combining simplicity, sturdiness and reliability, all for $825-not exactly cheap, but an excellent value. The company was confident it had a winner and gave the Model T the most extensive promotional launch in Ford history.
History of General Motors Founded in 1908, General Motors rose to dominate the car industry in the 1920s by countering Henry Ford’s dictum that customers could have any color Ford they wanted, “as long as it’s black. ” GM’s slogan was “a car for every purse and purpose,” and its customers could graduate from Chevy to Caddy, with multiple stops in between. Its innovations ranged from the automatic transmission in 1939 to the perfection of the tail fin in the 1950s, and it spent years worrying that its 50 percent-plus market share would provoke antitrust action.
GM pioneered a different kind of relationship with workers, too. After a string of violent strikes in the 1930s, GM became known as “Generous Motors. ” High pay and benefits helped lift its employees from working class to middle class and set a standard of living that came to define the American Dream. Diverse critics: For many of the hundreds of thousands of people tied to GM, that dream is now ending. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese competition, high oil prices and changing customer tastes undermined GM’s comfortable position.
Yet generations of success produced a toxic complacency at GM. While Chrysler and Ford faced crises that spurred them to cut production costs and revamp their cars, GM continued to feel invulnerable. GM has had a celebrated chorus of backseat drivers and has been hostile to them all. Warnings came from critics as diverse as Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and documentary filmmaker Michael (“Roger & Me”) Moore. GM tried to silence Nader and ended up paying $425,000 to settle charges of spying on him. It bought out Perot to get him off the board for $700 million.
And although board members began to wrestle with Smith, find later Stempel, over top management appointments, its rebel members didn’t get aggressive until the red ink began to gush. Each wasted year has made the GM turnaround a more expensive-and more painful-proposition. Nationwide, GM’s ripple effect is staggering. Some economists estimate that one in six American employees is affected by GM business, from tire designers at Goodyear to the advertising copywriters on Madison Avenue and stock analysts on Wall Street. The pain may be deepest in company towns like Ypsilanti, Mich.
, home to GM’s doomed Willow Run plant, with 4,100 workers; one study estimates a ripple effect of 18,000 more lost jobs. Like many GM insiders, local officials are still denying reality. “We just refuse to allow it to happen,” said state Rep. Kirk Profit last week. “We don’t want the divorce. ” The county is suing GM, claiming that it is breaching an agreement that involved tax abatements. GM denies it. But no court decision will keep. the plant open. GM will probably remain the world’s largest industrial company-but only if change is radical.
Inspiration may come from the ad slogan of Saturn, GM’s newest and most successful division: “a different kind of company. ” Saturn’s relations with workers and the UAW are, for GM, uniquely harmonious, with efficient, brand-new work rules on the floor, employees participating in pricing strategy and a pay scheme that rewards performance. Customers rave about the service and attitude of dealers. Sales seem to prove it all makes sense; Saturn is churning out 1,000 cars a day, but eager customers still have to wait weeks for delivery. Impact of Cars on Humanity
Initially, the automobile had been considered as a measure of luxury used only by rich. With the passage of time, the general population had started using automobiles because of the freedom to travel. People became able to go where they wanted and whenever they wanted. With the passage of time, the prices of automobiles had decreased and thus this measure of luxury came into the hands of the middle class. With the help of automobiles, people started living in any locations provided roads were available in that location. This was contrary to the time when people had preferred to live near rail lines.
Then highways were developed for the sake of providing convenience to people thus helping them in traveling from one place to another through the network of roads and highways. As the use of automobiles increased, more and more people preferred to live in suburban areas as the land was cheaper. In this way, people did not have to live in the congested and crowded areas where the accommodation rates were quite high. Before the invention of automobile, people were forced to live and work in the city because they did not have any mean of transportation that could help them reach to their destination in less time.
Automobile had provided them the opportunity to live in suburban areas while working in the city. They were able to reach their destination with the help of automobiles. More employment opportunities were found due to the invention of automobiles. New jobs were available in construction of highways and roads, fast food restaurants, auto shops, gas stations and repair stations, etc. The physical re-shaping of Western society by and for the car has been enormous, and can really only be appreciated by those who can remember an earlier and simpler age.
First came the negative impact — the things the car killed. City centers were severely damaged; many village shops and schools were killed store dead. Railways went, and so did country bus services. Risk — the risk of damage to life and limb — became an omnipresent thing; sights such as children playing in the street died out — too dangerous. New demands were placed on the human body; the habit of learning, and acting correctly and instantly on, new masses of data had to be acquired.
The majority of the human race had to develop habits of concentration, timing and skill which, before this century, had been the preserve of musicians and acrobats. The car can be defended against one charge: that it is in principle a wasteful user of space. It seems obvious that a machine that requires wide new roads to drive on, and an average of three spaces to rest on (one at home, one at work and a third either at a shopping centre or a place of recreation) ought to be — must be — a voracious consumer of land. But the car has in fact relieved the Western world of the need, quite simply, to maintain the horse.
At the beginning of this century, about a fifth of European farmland, and a quarter of American land, was devoted to supporting horses, a demand that has dwindled to insignificance. The space the car does demand, however, is where we notice it most, in and around our towns. Europeans have, by and large, been less willing to be ruthless with their towns than men like Robert Moses, the traffic boss of New York, who, in his own words, took a meat cleaver to Manhattan, and have landed themselves with a series of messy compromises in which every country thinks its neighbors are doing better, when in fact they are all in the same difficulty.
Conclusion Automobile invention is such a great invention that has helped people in thousands of ways. A life without an automobile seems to be impossible. The invention of automobile has changed the shape of the world. Population is spreading in suburban areas. New jobs are available. Use of automobile has given rise to air pollution too despite its thousands of benefits. People should use the fuels that have lesser percentage of harmful contents.