![]() That riled me, but I held my temper as I asked, “What’s the matter with you?” He bellowed: “There’s nothing the matter with me. But in the ’90s, even though I had a successful bicycle business, and was building my first car in the privacy of the cellar in my home, I began to be pointed out as “the fool who is fiddling with a buggy that will run without being hitched to a horse.” My banker called on me to say: “Winton, I am disappointed in you.” To advocate replacing the horse, which had served man through centuries, marked one as an imbecile. But the great obstacle to the development of the automobile was the lack of public inter- est. Because bikes interested me, my mind naturally turned to something a rider wouldn’t have to push and keep pushing if he was trying to get some place. When I first contemplated the application of gasoline for vehicles, I had a bicycle plant in Cleveland. I bought it back after Allison had used it a few years, and it is now in the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington. The exact date of the sale was March 24, 1898, and about a week later - on ApI received payment and shipped the car to its new owner, Robert Allison, a mechanical engineer of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. But whether Duryea built the first automobile or whether he didn’t, the fact remains I built, and sold, the first American- made gasoline car. I began serious experiments in 1893, and I am sure Duryea was conducting them prior to that year. My own conviction is that the honor belongs to Charles E. There has been much argument as to who made the first automobile in this country. ![]() He would sell his first car in 1897 - arguably the first automobile sold in the U.S. Winton was a bicycle maker, and as he writes below, he soon became infatuated with the idea of a bicycle that “a rider wouldn’t have to push and keep pushing.” In 1896, he founded the Winton Motor Carriage company, and soon began turning out cars at the dizzying rate of four per year. In 1930, Alexander Winton, by then one of the legends of the auto industry, wrote this article for the Post about the wild early days when even promoting the idea of a self-propelling machine would make you the object of ridicule. This article from the February 8, 1930, issue of the Saturday Evening Post was featured in the Post’s Special Collector’s Edition: Automobiles in America!
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