The world’s first truck

The French army commissioned the first steam-powered vehicle. Financed by the French Minister of War, the first steam-powered trucks were built between 1770 and 1801, designed by engineer Nicolas Joseph Cugnot. A vehicle still existing today – 7.25 meters long, with an enormous copper steam vessel at the front and a gross weight of eight tons – came at a price that is equivalent to some 400,000 euros. In its day and age, it was used to carry cannons; today it is one of the attractions of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

There was no lack of inventors and fiddlers in other countries, either. A certain Major Isaak de Rivaz, serving in the army of the then Swiss Republic of Valais, used a gas machine as a power unit in the early 19th century. The gas mixture was electrically ignited in an upright cylinder, and the wheels were driven via cable and ratchet. In 1864, Siegfried Samuel Marcus, an electrical engineer born in Mecklenburg, put a first vehicle operating on gasoline and petroleum into operation.

The crucial criterion is economic efficiency

It was not before the end of the 19th century that truck engineering had sufficiently advanced to be considered a viable proposition. From then on, people became ever more aware of the disadvantages of horse-drawn carts. Animal power did, after all, have its drawbacks. At the time, a horse was available at the princely sum of 1,500 Marks. And a horse had to be curried and fed, no matter whether it had work to do or not. The grooming of a horse incurred annual costs of some 1,000 Marks – to be paid on top of the purchase price. By comparison, Daimler offered his new 1.5-tonner at a price of 5,200 Marks, while the five-tonner carried a price tag of 8,500 Marks.

It is therefore not surprising that contemporary cost calculations arrived at results which were by all means favorable for the truck. According to these calculations, a medium-sized transport operator using horses incurred costs of 20.8 Pfennigs per ton-kilometer, whereas transport by motorized truck cost only 13.8 Pfennigs per ton-kilometer.

In spite of this, Gottlieb Daimler made light of the aspect of fundamentally new technology when he advertised his motorized truck at the annual agricultural show of Württemberg in the fall of 1897. It was just as paradoxical as it was shrewd for him to display his truck in the same row in which the traditional draft animals were lined up. He also distributed pamphlets on which he listed all the jobs the truck could do just as well as a workhorse, pitting this against the diseases, the thirst, hunger and wayward behavior of animals – which would not be found in a truck.

Transport operators engaged in heavy-duty distribution were the first to discover the advantages of the new engineering for themselves: brickworks and breweries ranked among the first branches of industry, which bought trucks in large numbers. The new five-tonner of 1898 was particularly popular among the breweries. Seven of the nine five-tonners recorded in the order books were supplied to customers as “ten-horsepower beer carts”. And in 1912, when as many as 5,400 trucks operated on the roads of the German Reich, 43 percent of these were doing service for breweries. Of all the trucks registered at the time, 23 percent were used in goods transport, and seven percent were operated by mills and brickworks.

The truck gains momentum in the 20th century

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