1769Reputable sourceWell documented
Cugnot's Steam Wagon
On the timeline · around 1769 ·
What happened
Tasked by the French army with building a machine to haul cannon, the engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot devised a working model in 1769 and, the next year, a full-sized three-wheeled 'fardier à vapeur' driven by a front-mounted copper boiler. Ponderous and hard to steer, it crept along at little more than 2 mph and had to halt every fifteen minutes to build up steam; after several years of trials the army abandoned the project.
Why it matters
Cugnot's fardier is widely regarded as the first self-propelled mechanical road vehicle — a steam-age ancestor of the automobile, built more than a century before the petrol engine made the motor car practical. The original survives in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
Sources
- Linda Hall Library. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (Scientist of the Day) · Reputable source