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In 1769, another Frenchman named Nicolas Joseph Cugnot attempted to adapt a steam engine technology to a road vehicle and the result was the invention of the first automobile.
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The Watt steam engine in 1769.
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In 1783, a French inventor by the name of Claude de Jouffroy built the Pyroscaphe, the world’s first steam engine.
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In 1801, British inventor Richard Trevithick unveiled the world’s first road locomotive, called the “Puffing Devil,” and used it to six passengers a ride lift to a nearby village.
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It was in 1804 though that Trevithick’s demonstrated for the first time a locomotive that ran on rails when another one he built hauled 10 tons of iron to the community of Penydarren in Wales to a small village called Abercynon.
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In 1812, Matthew Murray of Holbeck had designed and built the first commercially successful steam locomotive “The Salamanca” and Stephenson wanted to take the technology a step further.
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So in 1814, Stephenson designed the Blücher, an eight wagon locomotive capable of hauling 30 tons of coal uphill at a speed of four miles per hour.
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By 1824, Stephenson improved the efficiency on his locomotive designs to where he commissioned by the Stockton and Darlington Railway to build the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on a public rail line, the aptly named Locomotion No. 1.
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It wasn’t until 1858 that Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir of Belgium invented the internal combustion engine. And even though his subsequent invention, the first gasoline powered automobile, technically did work, credit for the first “practical” gasoline-powered car goes to Karl Benz for the patent he filed in 1886. Still, up until the 20th century, cars were not a widely adopted means of transport.
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Six years later, he opened the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first public inter-city railway line serviced by steam locomotives. His notable accomplishments also include establishing the standard for rail spacing for most of the railways in use today. No wonder he’s been hailed as "Father of Railroads."
