Automobile
A self-propelled road vehicle carrying its own internal-combustion engine and fuel — personal, point-to-point transport that needs no rails, no animal, and no fixed schedule.
深层档案目前以英文写就——经核验的翻译已列入路线图。浏览器自带的翻译功能在本页表现良好。
✦ 等等，真的吗？
In August 1888, without telling her husband, Bertha Benz drove his Patent- Motorwagen roughly 106 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her two teenage sons — the first long-distance car journey. Along the way she cleared a blocked fuel line with her hatpin, insulated a bare ignition wire with a garter, and bought the fuel, ligroin, at the town pharmacy in Wiesloch, still remembered as the world's first filling station.
它是什么
An automobile is a carriage that carries its own engine and its own fuel and steers on ordinary roads. The internal-combustion engine is what makes this possible: petrol packs enormous energy into a small, light tank, so unlike a steam locomotive the vehicle needs no rails, no coal tender, and no fireman — just a driver and a road. The result is transport with no fixed route and no timetable but your own: door to door, on demand.
它为何重要
The railway moved masses along fixed lines; the automobile moved the individual anywhere a road ran. Karl Benz was granted German patent number 37435 on his "vehicle powered by a gas engine," filed 29 January 1886 — the document often called the birth certificate of the car. His Patent-Motorwagen was not a horse carriage with an engine bolted on but a machine designed whole around its engine. It changed the geography of daily life: where people could live relative to work, how goods reached a shop, how far a family's world extended from its front door.
它解锁了什么
The car remade the built world around itself: paved highways, suburbs, filling stations, motels, and the vast oil and steel demand that came with them. Interchangeable parts and the moving assembly line made it cheap enough to own by the million, and the petrol engine that powered it also powered the truck, the tractor, and — bolted to a wing — the first aeroplane. Few machines have reshaped landscapes, economies, and the shape of a day as thoroughly as the private car.
最简可行版本
Karl Benz's Patent-Motorwagen: a light tubular-steel frame on three wire-spoked wheels, a single horizontal four-stroke petrol engine of about three-quarters of a horsepower over the rear axle, driving the back wheels by belt and chain, steered by a tiller — a self-contained carriage that starts and stops at will.
此条目尚待完整撰述——制图师正在工作。它在图中的位置已经核验无误。
解锁
前沿——此后尚未绘制。
来源
- — Karl Benz, German patent DRP 37435, "Fahrzeug mit Gasmotorenbetrieb" (filed 29 January 1886)
- — Beverly Rae Kimes, *The Star and the Laurel: The Centennial History of Daimler, Mercedes, and Benz* (1986)
- — James M. Laux, *The European Automobile Industry* (1992)
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