A lot of us drive cars these days, taking driving a car for granted. Perhaps our ancestors didn’t have cars but our grandfathers did, and our fathers bought a car, and we got one just a few days ago. It won’t be surprising if kids of the next generation expect to begin driving by age ten or so. But driving hasn’t always been around, you know. There was a time when automobiles didn’t exist, except in the imagination of a few whom we now might consider visionaries, but who, back in their days, were seen as madmen on flights of

fancy. People have tried to build vehicles since a long way back. In 1335, a man named Guido da Vigevano came up with the design of a wind-driven ‘chariot’.

It was kind of like a windmill with the drive attached to gears and the gears to wheels. Years later, the famous artist and sculptor Leonardo da Vinci came up with a brilliant design which was basically a mechanically driven tricycle that had to be mechanically driven and steered by tiller, with a differential mechanism placed in between the two rear wheels.

The very first functional ‘car’ was made in the 1678 by a Catholic priest, Father Ferdinand Verbiest. Legend goes, he built a steam powered vehicle for Chien Lung, the Emperor of China at that time. However, this has never been confirmed. In fact, it seems doubtful as to whether this vehicle was anything more than a working model, owing to the fact that the first steam engine (by Thomas Newcomen) was built only in the year 1712. Regarding Thomas Newcomen’s brilliant invention, it was an engine with a piston and a cylinder. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.

The engine used steam in the form of a condensing agent in order to create a vacuum, following which,, with a walking beam overhead, one could lift water by pulling on an attached rod. Let along portable, the gigantic new steam engine was not even under any pressure, but it was merely a boiler that was open and had been attached to the cylinder through pipes. But everything changed in the year 1765. A man named James Watt came up with the first ever steam engine that was pressurized. It turned out to be extremely efficient and more importantly, it was way more compact than the erstwhile Newcomen steam engine.

It wasn’t much longer after Watt’s invention that two men, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot and M. Mrezin came up with the very first vehicle that was self-powered A replica of this vehicle can be seen today at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris.