Cugnot's steam wagon, the first car
The first self-propelled car was built to haul cannons
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Army engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built a three-wheeled steam wagon to haul artillery for the French army. It moved at walking pace, kept stopping to raise steam and, legend has it, once crashed into a wall.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 18th century
Did you know
The world's first car, legend says, also had the first crash. Cugnot's steam wagon, built to pull cannons, went no faster than a walk, yet in 1771 it supposedly knocked down part of a wall. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1762 Accession of Catherine the Great — 7 years earlier
- 1764 Founding of the Hermitage — 5 years earlier
- c. 1768 Extinction of Steller's sea cow — 1 year earlier
- 1772–1795 Partitions of Poland — 3 years later
- 1783 Russian annexation of Crimea (1783) — 14 years later
Middle East
- 1747 Ahmad Shah Durrani founds the Afghan state — 22 years earlier
Asia
- 1755–1758 The Dzungar genocide — 14 years earlier
- 1757 Battle of Plassey — 12 years earlier
- 1761 Third Battle of Panipat — 8 years earlier
Americas
- 1776 US Declaration of Independence — 7 years later
- 1787 US Constitution — 18 years later
- 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution — 22 years later
Oceania
- 1768–1771 Cook's first voyage — 1 year earlier
- 1788 First Fleet arrives in Australia — 19 years later
Alive at the time
- Voltaire (aged 75)
- Benjamin Franklin (aged 63)
- James Cook (aged 41)
- Catherine the Great (aged 40)
- George Washington (aged 37)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (aged 20)
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (aged 13)
- Napoleon Bonaparte (aged 0)
- Carl Linnaeus (aged 62)
- Leonhard Euler (aged 62)