The motor car
A small engine burning liquid fuel puts mechanical power under individual control.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 14 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Karl Benz patents his Motorwagen in 1886; Bertha Benz drives it 106 kilometres in 1888 without telling him, proving it worked and generating the publicity that sold it. Petrol's energy density lets a vehicle carry its own fuel for long distances. The consequences run through suburbanisation, oil geopolitics, road death and atmospheric carbon, and the car reorganises the physical shape of cities more thoroughly than any building.