Made in the USA

Nearly two decades before German über-inventor Gottlieb Daimler introduced the first gas-powered 2-wheeler, a New England man invented the first motorcycle of any type. Sylvester Howard Roper's peculiar contrivance debuted sometime between 1867 and 1869. It was essentially a bicycle with a steam boiler bolted between the wheels. The Roper steam velocipede had 34-inch, wooden-spoked wheels wrapped in iron cladding. The single-cylinder engine was charcoal-fired, and the driver accelerated by twisting the straight, wooden handle bars forward, and braked by twisting back. It's unknown what kind of performance Roper's pioneering invention might have had, but it was enough to kill him during a demonstration of the machine in 1896.

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In 1905, Alabama inventor Mary Anderson patented a spring-loaded, rubber-bladed lever for use in streetcars. The idea was to clear rain, sleet or snow from the driver's window. Anderson's "Eureka" moment supposedly came while watching a streetcar driver who was forced to lower the front window of the car in order to see during a storm. Her invention could be triggered by a handle from the inside of the vehicle. The idea was ahead of its time, predating the original Ford Model T automobile by three years, and was derided by critics as potentially distracting. But, by 1917, the windshield wiper had become standard issue on automobiles.

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In an era when turning an ignition key has become passé, it's almost impossible to imagine the ordeal of starting a first-generation Ford Model T. Car engines had to be hand-cranked to life at the start of every trip, and after every stall. Inventor and later vice president of General Motors, Charles "Boss" Kettering, filed a patent for an "engine starting device" in 1911. By the time the application was approved four years later, Kettering's key-activated electrical self-starter had already debuted in Cadillac's 1912 model line. Hand-cranking became obsolete by the 1920s. Boss Kettering's legacy of innovation also includes Freon refrigerant, variable-speed transmissions and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

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There's a long tradition of safety features making their way from the racetrack to the highway. The first example, arguably, was in 1911, when Ray Harroun, an engineer and race car driver for the Texas-based Marmon Motor Company, won the Indianapolis 500 alone, without a riding mechanic to watch for cars coming up from behind. Harroun's secret was simple, and revolutionary. He couldn't find a riding partner, so he attached a small mirror to the windshield, and forced an entire class of race passengers out of a job. Harroun claimed to have been inspired by a horse-drawn carriage he had seen years earlier that had a similar device.

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First, Henry Ford changed the world in 1908 with the Model T, the first truly successful automobile. For his next trick, Ford invented modern manufacturing in 1913 — or, specifically, the conveyor-belt assembly line. By breaking down the construction of a Model T into 84 distinct steps, and mounting the components of each vehicle along a series of moving belts at his Michigan plant, Ford was able to produce a new car every 93 minutes. The result was a basic economic principle, borne out in wood, steel and tremendous profits.

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The first V8 engines were built after the turn of the century, and became a popular configuration for boat and aircraft powerplants. Their use in automobiles, however, was limited to European racers and a few custom models with extremely small production runs. In 1915, Cadillac introduced the first mass-produced V8, the L-Head Type 51, a water-cooled 5.1-liter engine with a maximum output of 70 horsepower. Over the years, V8s became quieter, and, beginning with Ford's own L-Head design in 1932, relatively affordable. By the 1940s, they had become indispensible, powering the massive fin-backed cars of the postwar boom years.

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In the 1920s no one used the term "bioplastics." Ford had simply begun making various minor automobile components out of corn and soybeans. In 1941, though, after 12 years of research, the automaker introduced the first plastic car. It was also the first bioplastic car, with a frame derived from soybeans. This experimental model weighed one-third less than an equivalent steel car, and was intended to be the first step toward the day when we would, as Henry Ford put it, "grow automobiles from the soil." That car never made it to production, but automakers have started using greater amounts of bioplastics in their vehicles in recent years.

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The timing couldn't have been worse: The Packard Motor Company introduced the first built-in, factory-installed air conditioning in its models in 1939, not long before the United States entered World War II, a time that called for thrift and sacrifice, not the extravagance of chilled air. It didn't help that the optional feature was a gargantuan device that filled half of the trunk and cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. Packard dropped the feature in 1941. Even after the war, air conditioning was an expensive luxury item, reappearing in the 1950s, and only becoming popular in warmer climates. Today, climate control is a given, and comes standard in some 99 percent of new vehicles.

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Toward the end of Charles Kettering's tenure at GM, the company's research division delivered yet another breakthrough technology: Hydra-Matic Drive, the first automatic transmission to reach production. Other manufacturers had tinkered with shiftless mechanisms, but GM pioneered this 4-speed system, which used both fluid coupling and hydraulic control to pull off reasonably smooth shift changes. Hydra-Matic was available as an optional feature in Oldsmobile cars in 1940, making those models the first cars without a clutch pedal. General Motors actually lost money on the first generation of Hydra-Matic transmissions; the option cost roughly $880 in today's dollars, less than it cost to build. But by 1948, some 95 percent of Cadillac buyers splurged on the automatic version, and the rest of the industry was forced to follow suit.

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As early as 1950, a mechanical engineer had come up with a device that could filter engine exhaust, converting the most toxic elements into more harmless ones such as hydrogen and oxygen, but it would take legislation to get the catalytic converter on the road. With new EPA exhaust restrictions set to take effect in 1975, automakers relied on the New Jersey-based Englehard Minerals & Chemicals Corp. for its pioneering device, which used platinum as a catalyst, arrayed in a honeycomb-like structure, to scrub the fumes. Since then, catalytic converters of various designs have been credited with preventing hundreds of millions of tons of hydrocarbons from filling the atmosphere.

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Based out of the Boston area, Erik Sofge is frequent contributor to Popular Mechanics and Slate.com. He specializes in everything scientific and technical.

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