than a hundred years earlier, the first self-propelled road vehicle had rumbled through the streets of Paris at nearly 5km/h (3mph) when Nicolas Cugnot (1725-1804) demonstrated his steam-driven wagon.The German Nikolas Otto (1832-91) made the first four-stroke internal-combustion engine in 1876 and in 1885 Daimler had installed a small four-stroke engine in a cycle frame. He drove his first four-wheeled petrol-driven vehicle round Cannstatt in 1886. In neighboring Mannheim, Benz had tested his three-wheeled car. Daimler licensed the French firm of Panhard and Levassor to build his engine. Levassor placed it at the front of his crude car and it drove the rear road-wheels through a clutch and a gearbox. Thus in 1891 the first car to use modern engineering layout was seen. Within three years of the appearance of the first Panhard France was staging motor races on public road.At the turn of the century, petrol, steam and electric power shared almost equal popularity for powering cars. Steam was well tried and reliable and electric vehicles held the land speed record. France had several established motor manufacturers - Panhard, Peugeot, Renault, Daracq, Delahaye and others; in Germany Benz had made the world's first standard production car, the Velo (1894), and the Daimler company was just about to present the Mercedes to the public (1901).In the United States (USA) the automobile would develop along different lines. There the car was seen not as a rich man's toy, but as a new method of communication in a continent in which travel had been restricted by a lack of roads and great distances.Great Britain (UK), slow to start, had legislated for the car in 1896 when the road speed limits were raised and soon such companies as Lanchester, Daimler (of Coventry), Wolseley and Napier were producing cars.Encouraged by the keen interest shown by King Edward VII, motoring in Britain became an accepted method of travel - for the rich. Some British manu...
