2. Who invented the first car? If we're talking about
the first modern automobile, then it's Karl Benz in
1886. But long before him, there were strange
forerunners to the today's cars, including toys for
emperors, steam-powered artillery carriers, and
clanking, creaking British buses.
Humans have possessed knowledge of the wheel
for several thousand years, and we've been using
animals as a source of transportation for nearly
that long. So, in some sense, the earliest
forerunners of the car date back to the earliest
mists of our prehistory. But perhaps a more useful
way of thinking of the car is anything that could
reasonably be called an "automobile" - in other
words, any vehicle capable of propelling itself. In
that case, we're at most talking about 439 years
of car history.

3. The very first car might well have been the
invention of a Flemish missionary named
Ferdinand Verbiest. Born in Flanders in
1623, Verbiest was an accomplished
astronomer who left Europe for China in
1658. He helped to modernize the now
outmoded Chinese astronomy using recent
European innovations, and he was asked
by the emperor to become the director of
the newly refurbished Beijing Ancient
Observatory. What's more, he spoke at
least five languages fluently, wrote thirty
books, was a skilled diplomat and
mapmaker, and tutored the long-lived
Kangxi Emperor in everything from
mathematics to poetry. He was, even by
the standards of the time, ridiculously
accomplished.

4. But the reason why we're talking about
Verbiest here is that he might - emphasis
on might - have invented the world's first
car. According to Verbiest's own text
Astronomia Europea, he built a small, self-
propelled vehicle. Steam technology was
still in its infancy at the time, but Verbiest
was able to build a rudimentary, ball-
shaped boiler, which then forced steam
towards a turbine that could turn the back
wheels. Verbiest says the vehicle was
meant to be a toy for the emperor.

5. Considering this is over 200 years before the
construction of what's generally considered the first
modern automobile, this is a remarkable achievement,
but there are some pretty big caveats here. I said the
car was small, and it was: about two feet long, far too
tiny for any human to ride in it. It's also not at all clear
whether the toy was ever built, or if it purely existed as
a design in Verbiest's imagination.
We do know Verbiest's close relationship with the
emperor gave him access to the finest metalworkers
China had to offer, so it's not impossible that he built
the toy. What we can say is this - Verbiest almost
certainly designed what was effectively one of the
earliest scale models of an automobile. (Although, if
we're just talking about designs for cars, then
Leonardo da Vinci has Verbiest beat by a good two
hundred years. But Leonardo definitely didn't build his,
so Verbiest has that on him.)