World Automobile Day 2021: How It All Began

If it weren't for the love of automobiles, maybe we wouldn't have had existed in the first place. Ever since the first automobile came into existence in 1879, the world changed, and continues to do so, with every passing day. On occasion of World Automobile Day 2021, we tell you how it came to be in the first place. Here's everything you need to know about World Automobile Day and how the age of modern gas-powered automobiles began.

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(Karl Benz with the Benz Motor Wagon. A photograph from 1925, when he was aged 81)

Way back in 1879, Karl Benz, the German pioneer, invented the world's first stationary gasoline engine, which was a one-cylinder two-stroke unit. Benz found success with this particular piece of machinery and that laid the foundations of the first automobile ever to be built. A few years later, in 1885, Karl Benz finally put together a tubular steel frame, a single-cylinder four stroke engine, a differential and three wire-spoked wheels. The engine had a displacement of 58 cubic inches and an output of 0.73 bhp and had a maximum engine speed of 400 rpm. The top speed of the Benz Motor Car was 10 mph or 16 kmph. It had significant amount of technology for its time, which included an automatic intake slide, a controlled exhaust valve, high-voltage electrical vibrator ignition with spark plug and a water/thermos siphon evaporation cooling.

(An old photo of the Benz Motor Wagon from 1886)

It was on January 29, 1886 that Karl Benz applied for a patent which was a 'vehicle powered by a gas engine'. The said patent number was 37435! This was the patent for the first ever automobile created in the world and history was made. In July 1886, the press at the time reported on the three-wheeled Benz Motor Car.

And since then 135 years have passed, which have brought innumerable technological advances and re-defined the way we see and experience mobility. To commemorate the day on which the first ever automobile patent was filed, January 29 is now celebrated as World Automobile Day.