The First American Gasoline Automobile

The day was September twenty-first, eighteen ninety-three, and the road was Spruce Street in Springfield. Two brothers, Charles and Frank Duryea, had spent most of the previous year converting a secondhand horse-drawn buggy, purchased for seventy dollars, into something they believed could move under its own power. They had fitted it with a four-horsepower single-cylinder gasoline engine, a spray carburetor Frank later said he designed after studying a perfume atomizer, and a friction transmission of their own devising.

Frank drove. The machine moved forward under engine power. Then the transmission failed after a few hundred feet, and the test ended.

But the vehicle had moved, on its own, burning gasoline, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Historians now mark that day as the first road test of the first American gasoline-powered automobile. Frank continued refining the machine through the autumn.

By November it ran reliably. The Duryeas founded the Duryea Motor Wagon Company in Springfield in eighteen ninety-five, the first American firm to manufacture and sell gasoline automobiles commercially. They built thirteen production models.

Charles and Frank later had a bitter dispute over who deserved the greater credit, a quarrel that outlasted both of them, but the vehicle itself is not in dispute. The original eighteen ninety-three machine was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in nineteen twenty, where it was restored and displayed as artifact number one of the American automobile age. Springfield was where the American car began, thirteen years before Henry Ford would build the factory that made car ownership ordinary.

The Duryeas simply got there first.