In the beginning, mans only form of transportation was his own feet. Later, to comfort his journey on foot, was the invention of footwear. Through envy of the speed of other animals he would learn to tame these animals. People who live in the desert ride atop camels. The people who live in the frigid climates travel by dogs. Some people from places like India ride elephants. But the must widely used form of transportation by animal power was by horse. Man would soon develop boats and ships to travel long distances over water and time would flow like the rivers and hundreds of years later, in the late 1700s steam power became the new craze. Steam power got the wheels turning amongst many inventors who put it not only on the tracks, but on the road as well. By 1770 the French engineer Nicolas Cugnot used a steam engine to power a three-wheeled vehicle.Steam engines were chugging their way through the U.S. and Western Europe for nearly a century. The next break-through didnt come with wheels but rather with pages. In 1824, French physicist Nicholas Carnot published a book in which he explained the principles of an internal combustion engine that would use a flammable mixture of gas vapor and air. Carnot never made a working model but Jean-Joseoph-Ettien Lenoir, another Frenchman, used the Carnots book on thermodynamics to build the first working internal combustion engine in 1859. It was a two-cycle engine with one cylinder. The fuel used to power the engine was totally different from all other power sources used then, which was only steam power. Lenoir used the same fuel that was used in the streetlights at the time called illuminating gas, or coal gas. He was able to sell several hundred of his engines to power such machinery as lathes, printing presses, and water pumps. He would later attach the engine to a carriage and become credited with inventing the first ever gas-powered automobile, but more importantly, the aut...
