Before the Internal Combustion engine, attempts to provide power to vechicles, to make them self perpelled, included steam, compressed air, windmills, and springs.

Leonardo was first thought to have used leaf springs, but now it has been determined that he used coiled springs. Granted, it would have been only able to propel the vehicle from one side of an arena to another, about 39 meters (117 feet), but before you scoff, think that the Wright Bros First Flight was only 12 seconds and 120 feet!

And Leonardo's Lizzie had programmed (read computerized) steering!!!!
Not unreasonable since Da Vinci is credited with the invention of the mechanical calculator, Not Blaise Pascal.

New York Times
Alan Cowell
Friday, July 2, 2004

VINCI, ITALY-In this era of SUV's guzzling ever more costly gas, and environmentalists battling to cleanse air polluted by auto exhaust, consider for one moment a car that is made mostly of wood, consumes no fuel and has steering that can be programmed in advance of the journey.

Call it the Da Vinci Coupe

In museums here and in Florence, Italian scientists have unveiled what they consider to be the first definitive version of a vehicle designed by a famed son of this Tuscan village - Leonardo da Vinci more than 500 years ago at a time when rapid transit relied mostly on horses.

Yet, though conceived in 1478, centuries before the T-model Ford introduced mass production, it seems a matter of debate whether Leonardo ever built one. Indeed, among his visionary catalogue of designs for unheard-of machines from helicopters to tanks, "almost nothing of Leonardo's was ever built," said Romano Nanni, the curator of the Leonardo museum and library in this village encircled by olive groves and vineyards.

By contrast, Paolo Galluzzi, an expert in Florence, said that "most probably" an early prototype was built. But he acknowledged in an interview, "it's difficult to say because there is no documentation."

The vehicle is, in truth, an ungainly looking and slightly mysterious creation - a boxy, open-top three-wheeler, just under 1.8 meters, or six feet, long and around 1.5 meters wide, with no seating and a motor made of coiled springs in what resemble wooden tubs.

To misquote the musical "Greased Lightning": Automatic, hydromatic et cetera it is not.

But, when it went on display in Florence, 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, east of here, last April, it represented something of a breakthrough, a culmination of years of research into the true significance of drawings from Da Vinci's Atlantic Codex, one of the great collections of his designs and sketches made between 1478 and 1518.

Long before steam engines and internal combustion, the design foresaw a time when it would be taken for granted that self-propelled machines - four-wheeled, two-legged and otherwise - would be the norm.

Even if some casual observers might question the comparison to modern-day cars, they still see the heavy, wooden cart here as an early version of mobile robots and computers.

"This carriage can be considered a precursor of mobile automatons, and perhaps, indeed, the first computer, in fact, ever built in Western civilization," said Mark Rosheim, an Americans robotics expert, in a study published in Italian by the Leonardo Library here in 2001.

For much of the 20th century, Leonardo's sketches had been thought to represent a vehicle powered by leafsprings on its uppermost surface - indeed an earlier model on those lines was built in 1953 but did not work.

But newer research conducted by Rosheim concluded that the springs on the upper surface were in fact designed as a device to program the steering for the machine while the automotive power came from two coiled springs below.

So what was it for?

With a range of around 36 meters, evidently not transport in the sense of the family Chevy.

Rather, according to Galluzzi, the director of Florence's Institute and Museum for the History of Science and the official coordinator of the project to build the car, the Da Vinci-mobile was designed to be used in some form of drama or spectacle where a self-propelled vehicle would be required to move from one part of a courtyard or arena to another.(The vehicle is on the museum's Web site, www.imss.fi.it.)

Its springs would be tensed, Galluzzi said, either by winding the wheels backwards or by pushing the whole machine backwards like the kind of spring-windup toy car sold for children. It would be held in position initially by a brake that could be released by remote control- in other words by tugging on a rope to unleash the mechanism. Then it would move forward almost magically, bearing some kind of special effects across a space with no visible means of propulsion.

Its display here is part of a broader effort to introduce visitors to the technology of 15th century Florence, when great architectural works such as the cathedral were built using cranes and other machinery that long predated the Industrial Revolution, often relying on wooden construction at a time when iron was too expensive.

Thus, last Friday at a news conference in Florence, Nanni and others unveiled machines such as a wooden crane designed to put in place the final marble blocks topping the Duomo in Florence, or another for beating gold leaf.

But, in this land whose enduring romance with cars from lowly Fiats to high-ticket Ferraris is coupled with a wish to be seen at the forefront of stylish design, the Da Vinci three-wheeler is more likely to reinforce the nation's sense of its roots. One tribute to it, indeed, came from Maserati, a producer of high-powered sports cars, which said the car confirmed Italian genius for designing automobiles.

There is, though, one slight problem.

While a scale model of the Da Vinci-mobile has been observed by Nanni and others to move, change direction, start and stop, thus proving that the design works, the ponderous, full-size model is seen, even by its own builders, as too hazardous a device to set loose on an unsuspecting public.

Eight months in the making from five different kinds of wood, thus, it has not been road-tested or courtyard-tested or any other tested. But that is not to minimize its importance.

"It was - or is - the world's first self-propelled vehicle," Professor Galluzzi said.

The New York Times > International > Europe > Vinci Journal: An Engine That Could? This One Took 526 Years to Move ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/international/
europe/02ital.html

The automobile is one of those engines of our ingenuity that always seem to have just one more antecedent. The first steam-powered road vehicles were made in the 18th century. But earlier cars had been driven by springs and by compressed air. Vehicles powered by windmills were built before them. Leonardo da Vinci sketched self-powered vehicles.

So let's limit our search to autos driven by internal combustion engines and to autos that were actually built. That laurel is usually given to Carl Benz. Benz believed in the internal combustion engine, and he worked single-mindedly to create an auto driven by one. He succeeded in 1885. He sold his first three-wheeled car in 1887; he went into production with a four-wheeled model in 1890; and today the Mercedes-Benz Company is still very much in business.

Benz, of course, wasn't first. The French inventor De Rochas built both an auto and an engine to drive it in 1862.

The search for the earliest internal-combustion-driven auto ends in England in 1826. An engineer named Samuel Brown adapted an old Newcomen steam engine to burn gas, and he used it to power his auto up Shooter's Hill in London.

Yet Benz succeeded where all those others didn't. Historian James Flink thinks that's because, just before Benz made his auto, the modern bicycle had come into being. It had set up the technology of light vehicles. And beyond that, it had also sparked the public demand for individual transportation. And that's why Benz succeeded 60 years after the first auto was built.

No. 125: First Auto
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi125.htm

The Walking Machine

In 1817 Baron von Drais invented a walking machine that would help him get around the royal gardens faster: two same-size in-line wheels, the front one steerable, mounted in a frame which you straddled. The device was propelled by pushing your feet against the ground, thus rolling yourself and the device forward in a sort of gliding walk. It had a short lived popularity as a fad, not being practical for transportation.

The next appearance of a two-wheeled riding machine was in 1865, when pedals were applied directly to the front wheel. This machine was known as the velocipede ("fast foot"), it was also made entirely of wood, then later with metal tires, and the combination of these with the cobblestone roads of the day made for an extremely uncomfortable ride. They also became a fad, and indoor riding academies, similar to roller rinks, could be found in large cities......

Bicycle History
http://www.pedalinghistory.com/PHbikbio.htm

Wright brothers history: First Flight, 1903
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/WrBr/wrights/1903.html

Leonardo da Vinci's Mechanical Calculator
http://www.maxmon.com/1500ad.htm