What it was like to drive a car in the 1890s

[Music] foreign let's take a look back in history today and discover what it was like to drive a car in the 1890s the first car with a combustion engine was built by Karl Benz and they did the first test runs in summer 1885. he filed a patent application which was granted in 1886. so in the 1890s cars were already a couple of years old but Ben still refused to sell any cars even if customers came into his workshop and put money on the table he said we shouldn't sell cars because the problems are still too severe and even we as the designers mechanics and Engineers cannot cope with the problems properly yet The General car industry consisted of Benz and Mannheim and Daimler in Stuttgart both put a small and fast running combustion engine into a simple frame with three or four wheels these vehicles were then produced and licensed in France and Great Britain where people were much more open-minded to the new technology and brave enough to drive cars so how did cars look like at the time this is a small car and this is a big car and by the way we see here Carl Benz Driving the Benz Victoria his favorite car which he drove until the end of his life in 1929 when cars already looked like this so let's go a bit deeper into the technical details of these first cars at Ben's cars the engine was allowing one cylinder in the back it had a horizontal flywheel to avoid any pitch moment they then used a lever Bell to transmit the power from the engine to the differential which was just what people knew from working with steam engines at the time one side of the belt wheel wasn't fixed on the shaft and could spin freely that was your neutral to start driving you pushed the belt on the wheel which was fixed on the shaft with a fork so the lever belt was clutch and transmission at the same time from the differential the power was transmitted by a chain either side to the rear wheels this allowed enough play between sprung and unsprung parts of the car because a live axle wasn't invented yet so that also meant these first cars didn't have a reverse later they added a second forward gear so you could push the belt a bit further and cars reached around 18 kilometers per hour when they later wanted to add a reverse when cars got bigger and heavier but didn't have enough space for three belts next to each upper and so Benz used a planetary gearbox something he designed already back in 1887 which was a very elegant solution and keep in mind Venice built everything for his car's in-house so now cars had three forward gears a reverse some engine updates for more power and could reach around 30 kilometers per hour the engines were relatively reliable compared to the rest of the car because there was already a lot of experience with stationary engines before people put them in cars but stationary combustion engines often worked with gas which was fine in a workshop but if the engine should be mobile it's harder to store enough gas for a decent range and so Godly Daimler designed a small and fast running engine which was running on liquid Fuel and by the way he was married to the daughter of a pharmacist this kind of fields were only available in pharmacies back in the day and this situation also stayed like this until 1900 when the first few stations came up so if you needed fuel you had to go to the pharmacy and buy large portions of it and if the pharmacy was already closed because you got stranded in the night you either had to wake up the angry pharmacist because they were usually living upstairs or you spend a lonely night outside the cooling was done through an evaporator so there was no water pump and it was an open system the water was usually enough for 15 to 20 kilometers so Ivory had some water with you to top up the system or you needed a bucket to refill the water on the way and if you didn't have a bucket review you had to find something else most men at the time used their hats to refill the cooling with water another frequent maintenance was the level belt because on Ben's cars the engine was in the back and the car had rear wheel drive the lever belt was pretty short and its own elasticity wasn't enough to compensate for the clutch and transmission work so the belt got longer and needed to be tightened every 40 kilometers the next thing was that because all Heavy parts were in the back the front of the car was very light which made steering very easy but if you accelerated from a complete stop to abruptly the car would do a wheelie and over stressful level belt again and probably for over rear passengers our luggage off in terms of seating arrangement there were lots of different concepts the base being the two-seater then there was a so-called vis-à-vis and torador or people sitting on longitudinal benches at the back these additional people brought some more weight on the front axle so the really problem wasn't so bad anymore as long as you took some people with you the belt issue however could only be solved later when the engine was positioned at the very front so that the overall length of the belt was much longer now its own elasticity was enough and it didn't get longer while driving anymore and later came the prop shafts the frame of the car was interesting as well if the upper body was made of wood it couldn't take much torsion and to provide a stable platform the suspension was linked between front and rear because cars were now pushed with their rear wheel drive and not pulled anymore like horse carry edges the steering was not a fifth wheel steering anymore and they used agaman steering if you want to know more about the odd history of the Aquaman steering and what its connection to Darwin and the pope check out my other video below to save the trouble with Aquaman steering carbons used a single wheel at the front for his first car and changed later to two front wheels steering column was a vertical one in the middle and had a real steering wheel on the top and the sides of the steering column where levers for throttle and ignition timing the driver was sitting on the left in Germany and there was right hand traffic but more on that later another common problem when driving such a car was that a chain fell off the bike chains they had at the time were too weak and self-made chains not reliable enough and putting it back on was very dirty and a tricky job other problems where ignition failures failing SEALS or stuck valves and later on flat spots because of horseshoe Nails in the road and that brings us to the wheels most of the rims at the time were wooden and fixed on the axle so you couldn't take them off the tires were full rubber tires with a steel cable inside these tires were not endless and hence had a split at one point if this split was on the ground where you turned a bit quicker or hit one of the many potholes the tire came off it was a large rubber steel piece which usually came off towards the driver's shoulder and if you got hit by it you couldn't move your arm for a couple of days putting these tires back into the rim was one of the main jobs of early car drivers you needed a large screwdriver and a lot of force at the same time you jacked the car up but couldn't take the wheel off so it much much harder and you did this outside at any weather later in 1897 the pneumatic tires came up so a tube inside and a tire outside there was no split anymore so this problem was solved but suddenly even many horseshoe nails and garage became a problem people had flat spots all the time so drivers started carrying spare tubes with them but this technology was pretty new and there were lots of different sizes pretty often the spare tubes didn't fit and the broken one had to be fixed at the side of a road only to fail again after a couple of kilometers so then you had to Jack the car up wheels still couldn't been taken off you needed to slip the tire off the rim on one side and get the tube out then fix it and put it back pretty often the tube was also damaged while putting it back because like with the previous tires you needed a large screwdriver and a lot of force and then you had to pump it and if you broke down near a village or in a town all this happened with a lot of people standing around the car watching you and blocking you and telling all the best jokes in the world people in this time created a new level of swearing now to the journeys since the first generation had a top speed of 18 kilometers per hour he needed around two and a half hours for a 35 kilometer trip when everything was going smoothly but if you got some problems on the way you could easily take three to six hours for the same trip which means that it would even be faster by walking so car drivers at this time were especially tough these first generations of cars could only take a seven percent ramp uphill if the hill was steeper someone needed to push and you always drove at daylight because either you didn't have lights or they would fail after five minutes anyway cars van got a cover which could be folded back it was a major job to put it back up and to strap it properly so it would be straight and stable also they use some soft sidewalls which could be connected with some buttons but all drivers hated that job and if it started to rain they held their hands out and said it's not so bad and it will stop in a minute only to stop a while later when everybody was already soaking wet and to do it anyway back in the day driving was very dusty because there were no tarmac roads ladies wore a dust coat and a net over their heads which was fixed around the neck man had a similar coat and glasses when the speeds got faster later on since we talk about faster speeds the band's test driver took a test run through the city with an updated car the car could now run 27 kilometers per hour and was suddenly faster than with Trump because the driver enjoyed overtaking the drum and the surprised faces in the drum so much he spent hours overtaking the drum over and over again and the next day the car manufacturer bands got a letter from the Trump company stating that Trump and cars shouldn't be driving in the same road anymore for safety reasons but in fact because it didn't look good on them for car drivers at the time everyone was your enemy even the state himself there was still the old middle-aged Road tax in Germany for Cobblestone roads which made car driving pretty expensive horse carriages tend to drive on the wrong side of the road and only changed right in front of the cars so cars had to break almost to a complete stop driver's Revenge shouting at each other so car drivers and cabbies were natural enemies sometimes it went so far that when horse carriages drove in the middle of the road so cars couldn't overtake or towards cars on the wrong side again because the driver fell asleep and all honking didn't help car drivers got their guns out and were shooting in the air to get by another problem was the police which was always accusing car drivers of something but most of the time speeding sounds familiar right in their view cars were always speeding but what was speeding in the 1890s there was no speed limit and the police didn't measure the speed instead of a respected citizen like a priest a mayor or a teacher was accusing a car of speeding it must be true and the driver got fined by the police in fact car drivers had to pay so many fines that there were rumors that whole Villages were rebuilt because of the new Big income source here's one example of a German car driver in 1899. in February the council forbids him to use roads with a whiff of less than 11 meters so pretty much all roads and he has to pay a fine of remark for using Rhodes in the city before in June 1900 he was reminded that it's illegal to park a car in public places this would cause lots of people to gather around the car which is blocking traffic and they would start playing with the car's horn which is creating noise disturbance the flying was a massive 30 mic or jail time a day later he was fined for speeding which was witnessed by a teacher the fine was free Mike Plus One mic service charge eight weeks later he got fined by the council again for parking his car in the city for one hour witness was a policeman the fine was two marks or two days in jail and snow was a problem too the thin Wheels without threat didn't have much grip and dig deep into the snow roads were not cleared from the snow yet and so car drivers had to have a shovel in their car and used large ropes around the rear wheels like snow chains to get through this no better but these ropes didn't last very long also there happened a lot of accidents with horses they turned their ears up and forward and that was the first sign that something was about to happen strangely enough they always tried to jump at the car as if they wanted to attack it When approaching a carriage horse is blocked away reversed and then raced across the street from one side to the other which caused many carry edges to land in the ditch result of that was a big argument with the owner and pretty often there were not just words it became a proper fight for that reason the horsey Horseless was designed in America with a fake horse at the front to not scare the real horses of the upcoming traffic this fake horse also worked as a wind deflector and fuel tank another problem where dogs which were suddenly running towards an interview early cars when they heard them and many got run over so drivers tend to use large ribs to keep the dogs away also children especially in the countryside came running towards the cars and started throwing rocks and dirt towards the car showing them the whip was useful here chicken were an even bigger problem because they sat in a group at the side of a road got nervous when they heard and saw a car and just in the last moment they ran on the street and got run over geese were smarter and just stayed where they were also the streets were a problem up until 40 kilometers per hour they were okay but with higher speeds the bumpy streets became increasingly dangerous country roads were a Sandy Cobblestone roads and the cities were bumpy loud and expensive another problem especially in Saxony where water drains at Hills which were deep cuts across the street these dangerously unsettled the car when driving downhill and took your momentum when going up and dry weather the streets were Dusty so cars pulled a huge cloud of dust behind them and everybody else on the street was swearing after the car when it was wet there were so many puddles everywhere but the car sprayed everyone and everything with mud so cars were generally very unpopular overtaking was extremely dangerous because no one could see a thing with these huge dust clouds and there was even a petition in the German Parliament to forbid cars to drive on country roads so the start of the car was not an easy one everybody especially people in the countryside hated them and pretty often the car owners hated their cars as well when they got stranded again with one of the many problems but there were a lot of resilient car drivers and engineers in the world who worked hard to overcome all of these difficulties lots of designs today are being taken for granted but it was a Stony way for every single detail so I hope you like this look back in history and if you did please consider to become a beast boy club member for more videos like this and check out my other historical videos below

Channel: B Sport

Views: 396,990

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Id: sOveAIMczg4

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023