Raw History of the Automobile - 1

Prehistory

Indicative starting point: year 12,000 BC. The time interval during which some essential objects for raising living standards of the early humans were invented is difficult to accurately establish at a global level. However, the time order of their appearance can and has been reconstructed on logical and archaeological bases. Auto Cult Notes is particularly interested in the automobile, of course.

Background

In the Paleolithic era, human ancestors began to use improvised tools made of stone and bone. Huts and shelters building tech evolved within the early communities. At a certain point, for the primitive houses, it became necessary to transport materials to the chosen construction site. Difficult problem: transportation of stones. Reason: their large mass. The Paleolithic lasted until 12,000 years ago.

After the vague threshold of the last 12,000 years, we are talking about the Neolithic era. Then progress really took off in agriculture and in some kinds of crude techniques. The late Neolithic is the historical phase of the appearance of the early things properly assimilable to the notion of “vehicle”. Their propulsion: mostly human physical force.

What our ancestors found back then: if a large and heavy boulder stays on the ground, it will be difficult to displace it, as it encounters a considerable moving resistance. The journey will be slow, arduous, full of obstacles. But if you push it along some tree trunks placed parallel, longitudinally and conveniently oriented in the direction of the desired movement? Well, this way the boulder was becoming much easier to move.

Chassis (well, kind of...)

The next step of progress was made starting from this finding: in the case of fixing the boulder on the logs, the sliding friction moved from the contact zones between the boulder and the trunks to those between the trunks and the ground. The idea turned out to be good for a smoother transportation, because you didn't have to use at least four logs, replacing them in pairs in front of the boulder as the travel was going on.  

Of course, in this case, you had to pull both the mass of the boulder and of the logs, so a better solution was needed regarding the traction power. Implicit advantage of the boulder fixed on mounted logs: the supporting assembly created for one transport could be reused for other subsequent transports. Thus appeared the first sleds usable with more or less effort on any kind of terrain and which, with indulgence, we could consider a kind of technical correspondent of the today rigid ladder chassis. It's just that our ancestors had not yet put wheels under this so-called sled chassis. But the age of wheels was approaching with the end of the Neolithic.

Rolls

Another direction of work toward the facilitation of heavy transport appeared during the Neolithic: the movement of boulders on trunks placed transversely in front of them, ensuring a rolling function. The sliding friction generated by pushing the boulder on the ground or longitudinal trunks was thus replaced by rolling friction – significantly easier to defeat, as some simple physical experiments can demonstrate. However, the travelling progress required the recovery of the rolling logs over which the boulder passed and their replacement in front of it, in the direction of advance. Clearly, you needed quite a lot of trunks per transportation act to do that.

Soon, the transport techniques evolved in the sense of pulling loaded sleds on logs with a roller function - those simple stiffened wooden assemblies, to which we have already attributed the significance and historical importance of the protochassis. This way, it was a lot easier to keep the boulder up on the rolling logs and to steer the whole stuff.

The domestication of animals also took place in the Neolithic, linked to the development of agriculture. Recourse to animal traction for moving heavy things kicked in sometime by then. It certainly did not occur to our ancestors that animal traction would continue to be used for many millennia, roughly until the turn of the twentieth century.

Vehicle

What if the rolling logs could be attached to the sled, instead of keeping to retrieve and replace them in front of it? Finally, this became possible thanks to the advances in the production, diversification and use of necessary tools to carve new components from wood and stone. Also, more flexible and strong ropes woven from vegetable fibers, and greases based on lard and/or vegetable oils came along to enrich the technical field of the transportation means.

We must admit, a stiffened sled equipped with supports for some basic rolling elements placed underneath is already a vehicle. Pulled by animals (whose domestication intervened in those times), this Neolithic vehicle solved the transportation needs of a primitive society much more efficiently than anything else known up to that time. 

However, this primitive vehicle encountered an appreciable rolling resistance along almost its entire width (more precisely, the entire length of the wooden logs/parts with roller function, arranged transversely to the direction of travel) and could not change the direction of travel too easily.

The highlight: during the time period in which these advances in transportation technology were made, ceramics had begun to be produced on potter's wheels, but for quite some time the potential of using the wheel concept in transportation was not noticed and exploited. One of the reasons for this situation is the lack of knowledge related to metalworking, which would later become the basis of superior techniques and tools. This tech did not develop until after the Neolithic, during the first phase of the metal age (copper, then bronze).