Quite a lot of Italians documented designs for wind driven vehicles. The first was Guido da Vigevano in 1335. It was a windmill sort drive to gears and has wheels. Vaturio designed a related vehicle which was also never built. Later Leonardo da Vinci designed clockwork driven tricycle with wheel steering and a gap mechanism between the rear wheels.
A Catholic priest, Father Ferdinand Verbiest has been said to have designed a steam powered vehicle for the Chinese Emperor Chien Lung in about 1678. There is no information about the vehicle, only the event. Thomas Newcomen builds his first steam engine in 1712 this was possibly a model vehicle powered by a mechanism like Hero's steam engine, a spinning wheel with jets on the edge. 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. 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. In 1765 James Watt developed the first pressurized steam engine which proved to be much well-organized than the Newcomen engine.
The first vehicle to move under its own power was designed by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot and constructed by M. Brezin in 1769. A second unit was built in 1770 which weighed 8000 pounds and had a speed on 2 miles per hour and on the cobble stone streets of Paris this was probably as fast as anyone wanted to go it.
No comments:
Post a Comment