Robert Anderson first electric vehicle

The idea of making a carriage that was driven by electricity originated with a Scottish inventor named Robert Anderson, who built a crude battery-propelled carriage sometime between 1832 and 1839. The batteries weren't rechargeable -- in fact, the lead-acid rechargeable battery that's used in most cars today hadn't even been invented yet -- so Anderson's electric vehicle didn't have much impact on the history of automobiles. But despite being something of a footnote in automotive history books, Anderson was the inventor of the electric car.

An electric car is powered by an electric motor rather than a gasoine engine. It consists of electric motor. This motor gets power from a controller. The controller gets its power form the array of rechargeable batteries.
The controller takes power from the batteries and delivers it to the motor. The accelerator pedal hooks to a pair of potentiometers i.e., variable resistors, and these potentiometers provide the signal that tells the controller how much power it is supposed to deliver. The controller can deliver zero power, full power when the driver floors the accelerator pedal, or any power level in between.

Oliver Evans - Steam carriage

Oliver Evans (13 September 1755 – 15 April 1819) was an American inventor. Evans was born in Newport, Delaware to a family of Welsh settlers.

The Oruktor Amphibolos

The device for which Oliver Evans is best-known today is his Oruktor Amphibolos, or "Amphibious Digger", built on commission from the Philadelphia Board of Health. The Board was concerned with the problem of dredging and cleaning the city's dockyards, and in 1805 Evans convinced them to contract with him for a steam-powered dredge.

 The Oruktor Amphibolos, as illustrated in "The Boston mechanic and journal of the useful arts and sciences" (July, 1834)

No technical drawings of the device survive, and the only evidence for its design come from Oliver Evans' own descriptions, which are contradictory, and most likely exaggerated. He describes the vehicle as a 30-foot (9.1 m) long 15 ton scow, powered by a 5 horse-power steam engine. Evans mounted the hull on 4 wheels and may have connected the engine to them, to drive it.Evans claimed that his dredge was the first self-powered amphibious vehicle, as well as the first self-powered land vehicle in the United States. The Oruktor Amphibolos was never a success as a dredge, and after a few years of sitting at the dock was sold for parts.

Trevithick's London Steam Carriage 1803

Richard Trevithick constructed an experimental steam-driven vehicle (Puffing Devil) at Camborne, Cornwall. It was equipped with a firebox enclosed within the boiler, with one vertical cylinder, the motion of the single piston being transmitted directly to the driving wheels by means of connecting rods. It was reported as weighing 1520 kg fully loaded, with a speed of 14.5 km/h (9 mph) on the flat. Trevithick ran this for several hundred yards up a hill with several people hanging on to it. Unfortunately, while the driver and passengers were in a pub celebrating the event, it set fire to a shed in which it had been left unattended, and was destroyed.

Description

    Not all the details of the carriage are known but the drawings which accompanied the original patent have survived, as have contemporary drawings made by a naval engineer who was sent to examine it. Further information has also been obtained from eyewitness accounts. The carriage had 8-ft-diameter driving wheels which were intended to smooth out the road surfaces of the time, to help the fire from being extinguished by shaking. A forked piston rod reduced the distance between the single cylinder and the crankshaft and was considered a singular innovation at the time. Spring-operated valve gear was used to minimise the weight of the flywheel, overcoming one of the drawbacks of industrial steam engines. The engine had a single horizontal cylinder which, along with the boiler and firebox, was placed behind the rear axle. The motion of the piston was transmitted to a separate crankshaft via the forked piston rod. The crankshaft drove the axle of the driving wheel (which was fitted with a flywheel) via a spur gear. The steam cocks (used to blow out water condensate from the steam chest), the force pump and the firebox bellows were also driven by the crankshaft.

The patent shows two features which may have been incorporated by Trevithick to discourage unlicensed copies: if the engine had been assembled as per the patent drawings it would have been able to run only backwards; and if the water pump had been arranged to be driven by the valve spring as shown, it would have run unevenly if at all.

William Murdoch's first Steam Carriage Model

By 1784, William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth in carnwall, UK.

Murdoch's working model was a three wheeled vehicle about a foot in height with the engine and boiler placed between the two larger back wheels with a spirit lamp underneath to heat the water and a tiller at the front turning the smaller front wheel. The mechanics of the model locomotive incorporated a number of innovations, such as a boiler safety valve, having the cylinder partly immersed in the boiler and using a new valve system on the lines of the D-slide valve

Cugnot's steam wagon

Nicolas Joseph cugnot demonstrated his fardier à vapeur, (steam dray) an experimental steam driven artillery tractor, in 1770 and 1771. But his design proved to be impractical, his invention was not developed in his natice france.

The design of the Cugnot Steam Trolley (Jonathan Holguinisburg) (1769)

Cugnot was one of the first to employ successfully a device for converting the reciprocating motion of a steam piston into rotary motion by means of a ratchet arrangement. The following year, a full-size version of the fardier à vapeur was built, specified to be able to carry 4 tons and cover 7.8 km or 4.8 miles in one hour, a performance it never achieved in practice. The vehicle, which weighed about 2.5 tonnes tare, had two wheels at the rear and one in the front where the horses would normally have been; this front wheel supported the steam boiler and driving mechanism. The power unit was articulated to the "trailer" and steered from there by means of a double handle arrangement. One source states that it seated four passengers and moved at a speed of 2.25 miles per hour.

Cugnot's steam wagon, the second (1771) version

The boiler is fixed infront of the vehicle and two cylinders were used. Look here how the steem engine works. According to this principle this vehicle was manufactured. 

Steam Engine Operation

       The following diagram shows the major components of a piston steam engine. This sort of engine would be typical in a steam locomotive. The engine shown is a double-acting steam engine because the valve allows high-pressure steam to act alternately on both faces of the piston. The following animation shows the engine in action. You can see that the slide valve is in charge of letting the high-pressure steam into either side of the cylinder. The control rod for the valve is usually hooked into a linkage attached to the cross-head, so that the motion of the cross-head slides the valve as well. (On a steam locomotive, this linkage also allows the engineer to put the train into reverse.) You can see in this diagram that the exhaust steam simply vents out into the air.

The vehicle was reported to have been very unstable due to poor weight distribution - which would have been a serious disadvantage seeing that it was intended that the fardier should be able to traverse rough terrain and climb steep hills. In 1771, the second vehicle is said to have gone out of control and knocked down part of the Arsenal wall, (the first known 'automobile' accident?); however according to Georges Ageon, the earliest mention of this occurrence dates from 1801 and it does not feature in contemporary accounts. Boiler performance was also particularly poor, even by the standards of the day, with the fire needing to be relit and steam raised again every quarter of an hour or so, considerably reducing overall speed.

About history of automobiles in short

        Several Italians recorded designs for wind driven vehicles. The first was Guido da Vigevano in 1335. It was a windmill type drive to gears and thus to wheels. Vaturio designed a similar vehicle which was also never built. Later Leonardo da Vinci designed a clockwork driven tricycle with tiller steering and a differential mechanism between the rear wheels.
A Catholic priest named Father Ferdinand Verbiest has been said to have built a steam powered vehicle for the Chinese Emperor Chien Lung in about 1678. There is no information about the vehicle, only the event. Since Thomas Newcomen didn't build his first steam engine until 1712 we can guess that this was possibly a model vehicle powered by a mechanism like Hero's steam engine, a spinning wheel with jets on the periphery. Newcomen's engine had a cylinder and a piston and was the first of this kind, and it used steam as a condensing agent to form a vacuum and with an overhead walking beam, pull on a rod to lift water. It was an enormous thing and was strictly stationary. The steam was not under pressure, just an open boiler piped to the cylinder. It used the same vacuum principle that Thomas Savery had patented to lift water directly with the vacuum, which would have limited his pump to less than 32 feet of lift. Newcomen's lift would have only been limited by the length of the rod and the strength of the valve at the bottom. Somehow Newcomen was not able to separate his invention from that of Savery and had to pay for Savery's rights. In 1765 James Watt developed the first pressurized steam engine which proved to be much more efficient and compact that the Newcomen engine.
The first vehicle to move under its own power for which there is a record was designed by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot and constructed by M. Brezin in 1769. A replica of this vehicle is on display at theConservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in Paris. I believe that the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D. C. also has a large (half size ?) scale model. A second unit was built in 1770 which weighed 8000 pounds and had a top speed on 2 miles per hour and on the cobble stone streets of Paris this was probably as fast as anyone wanted to go it. The picture shows the first model on its first drive around Paris were it hit and knocked down a stone wall. It also had a tendency to tip over frontward unless it was counterweighted with a canon in the rear. the purpose of the vehicle was to haul canons around town.