Category: Born on this day

  • Gottfried Schlöemer

    Gottfried Schlöemer

    Thursday 25th August 1842 Born on this day, Gottfried Schlöemer, mechanic and inventor. His principal claim to fame rests on the “motor wagon” that he built there in 1889, which some have hailed as the first workable gasoline-engine automobile ever built in the United States, four years ahead of Charles and Frank Duryea, who are…

  • Benjamin Franklin Goodrich

    Thursday 4th November 1841 Born on this day, Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, an American industrialist in the rubber industry and founder of B.F. Goodrich Company. Educated as a physician, Dr. Goodrich reached a licensing agreement with Charles Goodyear, and bought the Hudson Rubber Company in partnership with J.P. Morris. The company, located in Melrose, NY. ailed.…

  • Thomas Humber

    Thomas Humber

    Saturday 16th October 1841 Born on this day, Thomas Humber, British cycle manufacturer who founded the Humber bicycle company in 1868 in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. By 1896 the company, under new management, ventured into Humber motor cars and became the first maker of series production cars in England.

  • John Gray

    Friday 15th October 1841 Born on this day, John Simpson Gray, candymaker, business man, and banker from Detroit, who was an original investor in (and the first president of) the Ford Motor Company.

  • Louis François René Panhard

    Louis François René Panhard

    Thursday 27th May 1841 Born on this day, Louis François René Panhard, French engineer, merchant and a pioneer of the automobile industry in France. Born in Paris, he studied engineering at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and then graduated from École Centrale Paris in 1864. He was then employed by Jean-Louis Périn in a firm that produced…

  • Born on this day, Enrico Zeno Bernardi, an Italian engineer who prototyped the “Motrice Pia”, the first gasoline combustion engine (one cylinder, 122,5 cc), almost at the same time as German Karl Benz

    Born on this day, Enrico Zeno Bernardi, an Italian engineer who prototyped the “Motrice Pia”, the first gasoline combustion engine (one cylinder, 122,5 cc), almost at the same time as German Karl Benz

    Thursday 20th May 1841 Born on this day, Enrico Zeno Bernardi, an Italian engineer who prototyped the “Motrice Pia”, the first gasoline combustion engine (one cylinder, 122,5 cc), almost at the same time as German Karl Benz. As a child growing up in Verona, Bernardi spent much of his free time in blacksmiths’ workshops learning…

  • Born on this day, James Gordon Bennett Jr

    Born on this day, James Gordon Bennett Jr

    Monday 10th May 1841 Born on this day, James Gordon Bennett Jr., US publisher of the New York Herald and sponsor of the Gordon Bennett Cup Races, which ran from 1900 to 1905.

  • Born on this day, John Boyd Dunlop, inventor who founded the rubber company that bears his name, Dunlop Tyres

    Wednesday 5th February 1840 Born on this day, John Boyd Dunlop, inventor who founded the rubber company that bears his name, Dunlop Tyres. Dunlop patented his tyre on 7 December 1888. Unknown to Dunlop, however, was that another Scot, Robert William Thomson, had already patented the tire in 1847. Two years after he was granted…

  • John W. Stoddard

    Sunday 1st October 1837 Born on this day, John W. Stoddard, prominent manufacturer of agricultural implements and automobile pioneer. He was a cousin of General William Tecumseh Sherman.

  • Frank Huntington

    Frank Huntington

    Tuesday 9th August 1836 Born on this day in Atkinson, Maine, US, Frank Huntington. American inventor. In 1889 Huntington patented a gasoline engine propelled vehicle, four years before the Duryea brothers built and tested their first vehicle in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893 – considered by many as the first American gas powered car. It is…