German engineer
In 1892, German engineer Rudolf Diesel was granted a patent for a “New Rational Combustion Engine”. In 1897, he built the first diesel engine.[1] Steam-, electric-, and gasoline-powered vehicles competed for decades, with gasoline internal combustion engines achieving dominance in the 1910s. Although various pistonless rotary engine designs have attempted to compete with the conventional piston and crankshaft design, only Mazda’s version of the Wankel engine has had more than very limited success.
All in all, it is estimated that over 100,000 patents created the modern automobile and motorcycle.[35]
Mass production
See also: Automotive industry
Ransom E. Olds founded Olds Motor Vehicle Company (Oldsmobile) in 1897
Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Company in 1903
1927 Ford Model T
Kiichiro Toyoda, president of the Toyota Motor Corporation 1941–1950
Mass production at a Toyota plant in the 1950s
The Toyota Corolla is the best-selling car of all-time
Large-scale, production-line manufacturing of affordable cars was started by Ransom Olds in 1901 at his Oldsmobile factory in Lansing, Michigan and based upon stationary assembly line techniques pioneered by Marc Isambard Brunel at the Portsmouth Block Mills, England, in 1802. The assembly line style of mass production and interchangeable parts had been pioneered in the U.S. by Thomas Blanchard in 1821, at the Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts.[36] This concept was greatly expanded by Henry Ford, beginning in 1913 with the world’s first moving assembly line for cars at the Highland Park Ford Plant.
As a result, Ford’s cars came off the line in fifteen-minute intervals, much faster than previous methods, increasing productivity eightfold, while using less manpower (from 12.5-man-hours to 1 hour 33 minutes).[37] It was so successful, paint became a bottleneck. Only Japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colors available before 1913, until fast-drying Duco lacquer was developed in 1926. This is the source of Ford’s apocryphal remark, “any color as long as it’s black”.[37] In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months’ pay.[37]
