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What Was The First Car? 

Several Italians recorded designs for wind driven vehicles. The first was Guido da Vigevano in 1335. It was a windmill type drive to gears and thus to wheels. Vaturio designed a similar vehicle which was also never built. Later Leonardo da Vinci designed a clockwork driven tricycle with tiller steering and a differential mechanism between the rear wheels.
A Catholic priest named Father Ferdinand Verbiest has been said to have built a steam powered vehicle for the Chinese Emperor Chien Lung in about 1678. There is no information about the vehicle, only the event. Since Thomas Newcomen didn't build his first steam engine until 1712 we can guess that this was possibly a model vehicle powered by a mechanism like Hero's steam engine, a spinning wheel with jets on the periphery. Newcomen's engine had a cylinder and a piston and was the first of this kind, and it used steam as a condensing agent to form a vacuum and with an overhead walking beam, pull on a rod to lift water. It was an enormous thing and was strictly stationary. The steam was not under pressure, just an open boiler piped to the cylinder. It used the same vacuum principle that Thomas Savery had patented to lift water directly with the vacuum, which would have limited his pump to less than 32 feet of lift. Newcomen's lift would have only been limited by the length of the rod and the strength of the valve at the bottom. Somehow Newcomen was not able to separate his invention from that of Savery and had to pay for Savery's rights. In 1765 James Watt developed the first pressurized steam engine which proved to be much more efficient and compact that the Newcomen engine.

 

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Street Show

Expect to be entertained by interviews with many of the top names of British and International Motor Sport on the Autosport stage which is sponsored by BP Ultimate.A number of major manufacturers including Renault, Seat, Subaru and Mitsubishi had their latest cars on display at the show.One of our favourite sections of Autosport is the WRC display where you can see and photograph the star cars of WRC in a simulated natural setting without them flying past at speeds that make it impossible to photograph them.  In 2006 the display was particularly realistic, and we expect this year's to be at least as good, if not better.The stands of several of the major component suppliers suppliers also featured some great new road cars that most visitors won't have seen before, such as this 500bhp Giugiaro designed Mustang.

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