The word automobile is a French word with Greek and Latin roots meaning a vehicle that moves itself.  Car, the common alternative name, originates from the Latin word carrus or carrum for ‘wheeled vehicle’ or the Middle English word carre for “cart”, words that are believed to have originated from the Gaulish word karros referring to a Gallic Chariot.  Car became synonymous with automobile around the end of the 19th century, when early models were called horseless carriages.

These days we think of the car as almost a wholly 20th century invention, but, like the ancient origins of its name, its history is, at least conceptually, rooted in inventions dating back to the 17th century.  In 1672, Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish member of a Jesuit mission in China, designed a 65 cm-long steam-powered, self-propelled vehicle for the Chinese Emperor.  Steam generated in a ball-shaped boiler and directed through a horizontal pipe at the top towards a simple, open turbine reportedly turned the rear wheels of a four-wheeled platform-like carriage.

Verbiest's design is recorded in drawings and since it was only a scale model not designed to actually carry human passengers or a driver, it’s a stretch to call it a car.  Nor is it known if the model was actually built.  Nevertheless, it was a harbinger of things to come in the next century when inventors in France, Britain, Russia and the United States worked on designing steam-powered self-propelled vehicles large enough and maneuverable enough to transport people and cargo on roadways.

Powering such vehicles was not the only challenge. The origins of modern braking systems, transmissions, steering mechanisms, and a host of other inter-related technologies date back to this era as well.

By the latter half of the 19th century, several German inventors working independently on vehicles powered by gasoline fuelled internal combustion engines succeeded in producing what some refer to now as “the first really practical automobiles.”  Karl Benz in 1885 built the first vehicle that bears significant similarity to today’s motor vehicle— the Benz Patent “Motorwagen”.  The Motorwagen achieved renown when Mr. Benz’s wife, Bertha Benz demonstrated its fitness for daily use by driving it from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back — more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) —in August 1888.

In the United States, the history of the automobile is not so much about the origins of ingenious technological invention as it is about the origins of modern manufacturing, marketing, and business organization and management systems.

In 1893, two brothers, Charles and Frank Duryea, bicycle mechanics, constructed a roadworthy copy of Benz’s Motorwagen in their shop in Springfield, Massachusetts.  The brothers founded what is considered to be the first American automobile manufacturing company, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company.  In 1896, they sold their first vehicle and proceeded ambitiously to produce 12 more just like it.

Not until 1908 did Henry Ford start selling his brilliant interpretation of the concept, in impressive numbers.  From 1908 until 1927, the Ford Motor Company manufactured what remains the most influential, iconic, and longest running best-selling —surpassed only by the Volkswagen Beetle in 1972—motor vehicle of the twentieth century, the Model T Ford.