TEST YOURSELF

The significance of the motor car to the recent history of civilization is

beyond question. The car’s precise date o__1)

introduction, however, will be

СибАДИvelop ‘hors carriages’. Nikolaus Otto is generally regarded as

15

2) decades to come. That’s bec

3), ever since the in-

debated f

vention of t

4) wheel around 4000 BC, humans have tr

5) to design

a self-propelled machine to rep

6) the horse.

Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler m

7) have been credited with pro-

ducing t

8) first vehicles powered by the inte

9) combustion en-

gine in 1885, but the ori

10) of the car go back a

11) far as the Old

Testament. This

fore

12) of

machines propelling themselves on

la

13) and the air. The great 13-th-century scie

14) and phi-

losopher Roger Bacon predicted the adv

15) of machine-powered vehi-

cles on land a

16) water, while Leonardo de Vinci’s diag

17) of

a self-propelled carriage are a matter o 18) record. In 1472, Roberto Valturio

described a machine desi

19) for war purposes, which was t 20) be

moved by means of la

21) windmills transmitting their motion through

cra

22) and gears. Clockwork and wind-assisted vehi

23) all

played their part in t

24) pre-history of the car but t

25) greatest influ-

ence

came

from

the

St

26) Age. In the early 1760s

Frenchman

Cap

27) Nicolas Joseph Cugnot built a powerful steam-driven tractor

t 28) tow artillery hardware. Only partly succe

29), it was left to

a group o

30) British, American and European inventors t

31) pursue the de-

velopment further. Of th

32), Richard Trevithick’s London Carriage was

both t

33) most practical and effective.

It w

34) the development of the internal combu

35)

engine from the mid-1800s onwards wh

36) spurred inventors on to de-

37)

СибАДИ94)

16

cause many of the car manufa

56) were being run by engi-

neers a

57) not businessmen, they had the auth

58), and the

audacity, to build exa

60)

59) what they wanted.

We

may

th

that our fuel-injected, 16-valve,

electronically-

chipped and heavily-

61) cars of the 1990s represent

the pinn

62) of automotive design, but this i

63) not the case. In

fact, ap

64) from the electronics, most of t

65) concepts found in a

typical modern c

66) are little more than an advan

67) of

an

idea

originally

devised

dec

68)

ago.

Only

the

lack of

suit

69) materials available to engineers at th

70) time stifled in-

spired thought.

71), of course, was the price. A

72) the car’s populari-

Another fac

ty spread, s 73) the demand for cheap, simple tran

74) for the

masses,

epitomized

by t

75)

Ford

Model

T

By the mid-1920s

nea

76) 700,000 cars were in daily use o

77) British roads and more

than t

78) million could be found in t

79) USA. Things weren’t rosy

f

80) all vehicle

manufacturers,

however, with ma

81) small outfits

floundering early-on. As t

82) car became big business across t

83)

world only the strongest survived.

N

84),

more

than ever, the car ne

85)

to get in step with

chan

86) times and attitudes to its u

87). A century has passed

since Benz a

88) Daimler showed off their inventions t 89) a hostile pub-

lic and still the c

90) faces severe criticisms over its pl

91) in socie-

ty. Moves to tax cu

92) and resist its role as a prov

93) of inde-

pendent transport and mass emplo

are gathering momentum.