THE AUTOMOBILE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 2 June 1928, Page 14

THE AUTOMOBILE.

WHO WAS THE INVENTOR? The appointment iof a committee by the President of Austria to collect funds for the erection of a memorial to Siegfried Marcus, Austrian engineer, revives again the question. “Who invented the automobile?’’

“The answer to the question depends very much upon how one chooses to define the word ‘automobile,’ ” says tiie “Denver Post.” “If one means a \ elude capable of selr-propulsion, one can go back as far as 1770 to find the first automobile, for in that year Nicholas Cugnot, a I renchman, designed and built two road carriages that propelled themselves by steam. Oliver Evans, a Philadelphian, achieved practical success in the same way a few years later. “ ‘Steam waggons’ occupied the attention of many inventors during the first quarter of the nineteenth century on the Continent and in England, particularly. Apart from the fact that they had no horses hitched in front of them, they did not resemble the automobile as it is now known. The first vehicles that might be regarded as the lineal ancestors of the modern automobile appeared in the United States in the early ’nineties. And from these machines, so scorned and mocked at in those days, have come the superb automotive creations of to-day. “it may be true that the automobile was invented- in Europe, but certainly to the United States must go a large measure of credit for its development into the mast useful medium of individual transportation the world has known.”