FIRST AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT
As we have already noted, the automobile antedated the railway locomotive. It was an accident that took the primitive steam carriage off the high roads and put it on rails. In 1802 Richard Trevithic, while speeding along a road at the frightful speed of ten miles per hour, lost control of his machine, ran into a fence and ripped off a number of palings. That accident spelled the doom of the early automobile. So dangerous a machine was not allowed to run at large. Special tolls and restrictions were placed on power-driven road vehicles. As late as 1896 when the automobile had become a practical machine in France and was being rapidly developed in this country, England still had a law prohibiting any power-propelled vehicle to travel over the highways at a higher speed than four miles per hour and required further that the vehicle be preceded by a man bearing a red flag.
The most important early American road car was that built by Richard Dudgeon in 1855, which made a record speed of forty miles per hour. In 1889 Serpollet, in France, invented the flash boiler and interest in steam-driven automobiles was revived. In a flash boiler water is turned into steam as it is used by injecting small quantities at a time in a red-hot tube. In the meantime, however, the internal combustion engine was being developed. Lenoir, in France, was the first to build a motor car driven by an internal combustion engine. He obtained a patent on such a vehicle in 1860. However, the real father of the modern automobile was Gottlieb Daimler of Germany, who patented a motor vehicle in 1884 driven by an internal combustion engine. The next year Karl Benz, another German, built an automobile.