We take a look at seven common technologies in your car to see when they were invented. You may be surprised.
- Automatic transmission
- Electric cars
- Four-wheel drive
- The sunroof
- Turn signals
- Anti-lock brakes (ABS)
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Microsoft founder Bill Gates when comparing the progress of computers with cars, famously claimed that if cars had advanced at the same rate as computers they would cost $25 and get 1000 miles per gallon. In response, a witty representative within Ford’s US Public Relations division commented that any car built on the same principles as Microsoft’s computers would crash twice a day and need to be replaced every time the lines on the road were repainted. BURN!
Progress at a pace that meets market expectations and nothing more has become a characteristic of the current car industry. Automotive innovations which we today take for granted were literally front-page news and rivals clamoured to find ways to compete.
Today the giant strides of a century ago have been reduced to tottering baby steps, with every desirable attribute seemingly invented and masses of computer time now devoted to redesigning the door handles. But hey, let’s not get enmeshed in the disappointments of today when we can look back a long, LONG way to the days when automotive inventions really did make a difference.
Automatic transmission
There is hot debate as to the definition and origins of a transmission which needed no clutch and obliged the driver to select a gear just once during their journey. Several inventors going back to the very early 20th Century earn credit for partially-automated systems, including Henry Ford with his ingenious pedal-operated planetary gearbox.
However, if your idea of a true automatic transmission involves fluid and a torque converter then the invention of that device is relatively recent and its origins again disputed. General Motors in 1932 began working on a ‘fluid drive’ system, concurrently with the efforts of two Brazilian engineers who developed a similar system and reportedly sold it to General Motors.
Whatever the origins, GM’s auto-box would appear in 1940 as the Hydra-Matic and then be marketed under a variety of names including Dyna-Flow and Flightpitch. Chrysler was working along similar lines and in 1941 introduced the semi-automatic Vacamatic. It in 1954 would give birth to the fully-automated Powerflite.
Electric cars
So much controversy surrounds today’s electric cars you would think they were a discovery that had only just been announced. Electric carriages date way back to the 1830s and recognisable motor vehicles that use electrical power have been with us for 120 years. A French-built electric vehicle was the first car to exceed 100km/h and that was way back in 1899.
Early electric cars were clean, silent and even back then could travel a decent distance despite their rudimentary batteries. Development of the electric starter almost eliminated the tendency of big engines when being started by hand to break wrists and fling your chauffeur into the shrubbery.
Then in the 1920s came cheaper petrol which really brought electric vehicle sales to a shuddering halt. Oil embargoes during the 1950s and 1970s encouraged inventors to devise a variety of electric-powered delivery vans and ‘city’ cars but there has been little motivation – and in fact considerable opposition – until very recently to electric vehicles as regular transport.
Four-wheel drive
If you happen to own a Porsche Cayenne – or a Carrera 4 or 959 – then your car’s lineage harks all the way back to a design displayed in 1899 by the extraordinary Ferdinand Porsche. Porsche’s first 4WD car was electrically driven as well and provided inspiration for other engineers to pursue similar designs.
Even faraway Australia got involved via a 1907 patent lodged by the Caldwell brothers – Sydney-based railway engineers – for a 4WD, four-wheel steered truck. The US Army adopted a similar design in 1912 and Spyker in Holland chimed in with an all-wheel drive passenger car.
World War 2 provided the impetus for massive advances in all-wheel drive design and translation into civilian life via such brands as Jeep, Land-Rover and Toyota’s Landcruiser. Racing on loose surfaces demanded maximum grip and Audi in 1981 altered rallying forever with its four-wheel drive Quattro.
The sunroof
Back when cars were new and rudimentary, having a top to keep out the rain and beating sun was a luxury. By the 1920s most cars designed in Britain were fully enclosed yet owners in a land where every second of sunlight was precious still craved having Old Sol belting down on their bald spots.
Bentley was among the first UK brands to offer a sliding roof panel in coach-built ‘saloons’ but it was down-market Hillman which in 1931 made an opening roof optional on its Aero Minx. From then on every Brit brand needed access to the open air, with the Webasto company offering an after-market roll-back conversion for those cars not fitted with a proper sliding roof from new. The glass ‘moon-roof’ which remains so popular today was an American invention which first appeared on 1970s Lincolns and other high-specification US Fords.
Turn signals
Devices which indicate a vehicle’s intended direction of travel have been available for many years, however that has not stopped some drivers absolutely ignoring their existence. Buses and trucks from the 1920s often came equipped with a ‘mechanical hand’ which the driver could deploy from inside the cabin to signal if the vehicle was stopping or turning right.
Trafficators were little hinged arms that popped out from the sides of smaller vehicles and fashionable for a while but by the late-1950s almost every passenger model was equipped with flashing lights front and rear and a lever on the steering column to activate them.
Various brands made indicators a styling feature, including Citroen which mounted them on the roof of its DS19 and Volkswagen with distinctive mudguard ‘pods’. Several US brands during the 1960s adopted ‘sequential’ indicators that would flicker across the car’s rear panel to the fascination of an emerging generation of drug-enthusiasts.
Anti-lock brakes (ABS)
Mercedes-Benz likes to be considered a pioneer of anti-lock braking but the concept was in widespread use well before being installed by Benz on its W116 models. Every kid who ever locked the front brake on their pushbike knew it was a good way to spend the rest of their life with a denture but railway and aviation engineers had the opposite problem. Their vehicles once the wheels stopped turning would slide almost forever until halted by a devastating impact.
Locomotive designers more than a century ago were trying various methods of maintaining grip on wet tracks. Then came Dunlop with its Maxaret anti-lock braking system that would do the same for a range of military and commercial aircraft.
Maxaret brakes were also installed from 1966 on Jensen’s all-wheel drive ‘Ferguson Formula’ Interceptor. Ford and General Motors during the 1970s toyed with rudimentary systems before Mercedes-Benz in 1978 made four-channel electronic ABS available for the first time in a production car.
Airbags
As the late Doris Day famously sang, ‘Folks are dumb where I come from’ and it is fair to say that airbags came into being because so many Americans regarded wearing seat belts as an infringement of their civil rights.
Rudimentary systems that used compressed air were trialled in Germany during the 1950s but 1968 saw the ‘electro-mechanical automotive airbag system’ patented by US engineer Allen Breed. By 1973, air-bags became available in the Oldsmobile Toronado and a few years later by other General Motors models. Inflators using compressed nitrogen were used initially, followed later by small explosive charges.
What no one seems to have anticipated is the ability of these charges to fragment their propellant cartridges – as has happened recently in vehicles using Takata air-bags. Here the air-bag is more likely to cause occupant deaths than an actual crash.
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