All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

3i4 All About Inventions tries assumed a more sympathetic attitude towards the scheme and encouraged inventive fertility. In 1865 a French investigator named Lenoir brought out a motor using gas as fuel, and in which the gaseous charge was ignited by an electric spark, essentially for the propulsion of road-carriages. This was the first internal combustion engine. The Lenoir engine attracted considerable attention throughout the world, and incidentally it induced a German engineer, Siegfried Markus, to turn his atten- tion to the creation of a motor-driven vehicle using an engine of this type. Markus took an ordinary two-wheeled hand-cart, upon the axle of which he mounted two flywheels. Beneath the baseboard he installed a motor using benzine as fuel. A two- wheeled fore-carriage was tacked on. This served for steering, movement to the right or left being effected through a small handwheel and worm-gearing. This car was completed shortly after Lenoir’s motor made its appearance, and there is no doubt but that the Frenchman’s novel engine induced Markus to contrive a motor working upon a similar principle. Be that as it may, Markus completed his vehicle and ran it freely upon the roads, generally selecting the cloak of night for these novel trips owing to the crowds who were wont to collect to see the new sensation. At last these gatherings of curiosity-pro- voked sightseers reached such proportions as to bring about a cessation of traffic. The result was that the police intervened and compelled Markus to take his car off the roads because it constituted a public nuisance. This car is still in preservation, being an honoured relic of the Austrian Automobile Club in Vienna.