The Evolution Of The Automobile

No technology has had a greater impact on the American life than the automobile. Where we live, how we work, and how we travel, what our landscape looks like, our environment have all been shaped by the automobile. There isn’t a better place that demonstrates the social, geographic, and political changes brought by the industry than Detroit, the motor city. Detroit was situated to be a center of the American automobile industry. All of the material that was needed to build was easily accessible to the city by the great lakes waterways and by rail. The automobile industry helped people with their everyday lives and changed the way people saw the world.

Starting in the late 1700’s, European engineers began messing with motor powered vehicles. By the mid 1800’s, steam, combustion, and electrical motors had all been attempted. By the 1900’s it wasn’t very clear on which type of engine would really power the automobile. At that time, electric cars were the most popular but there were no batteries at that time that would allow a car to move very fast or a long distance. Commercial production in the United States began at the beginning of the 1900’s. In the early 1900’s, the United States had about two thousand firms producing one or more cars.

The first automobile production for the masses in the US was the three horsepower, curved-dash Oldsmobile which four hundred and twenty five of them were sold in 1901 and five thousand in 1904. This Oldsmobile is still a very popular car to most collectors today. From 1904 to 1908, two hundred and one automobile manufacturing firms went into business in the United States. One of the firms was the Ford Motor company which was organized in June 1903, and sold its first car on the following July ...

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... the world. From humble origins in the late nineteenth century, the auto industry grew explosively in the early and mid-twentieth century’s, scattered and decentralized, and reconstituted its work force. The impact on everyday life, from where people live to what kind of work they did cannot be underestimated. The hard work people put in to making the assembly line helped almost all companies succeed in making more cars. Just imagine if the assembly line was not created. It would take years to make a car and the cost of a car would be very expensive. Those changes were especially visible in Detroit which was the capitol of the auto industry automobile nation. The automobile industry would not be where it was today if it wasn’t for all the hard work people put in it in the 1900’s. Ford, Chrysler and general motors’ help create what we call today as the automobile.