The first self-propelled carriages in the description of their inventors (domestic experience)

Abstract

The authors considered first inventive period in the history of the domestic automotive industry, analyzed preserved to our days descriptions of the “horseless carriages” of Shamshurenkov and Kulibin. Relying on the presented material authors conclude that the main way to describe the new inventions became terminologization or specification of the existing term, as a rule, borrowed from related areas of technical knowledge. It is noted that over time, many Russian words have given way to the terms that came from French and German, and then English. This process was driven by the general internationalization of the automotive terminology as well as the superiority of the US automotive industry in the late XIX - the beginning of XX century, during the creation of the modern car. Analysis of inventions of Shamshurenkov and especially of Kulibin from a technical point of view (re-creation of models of self-propelled carriages, decoding surviving drawings), as well as their engineering judgment in a large number of special studies on the professional and amateur levels (model of Kulibin carriage is presented at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, periodically in Internet appear materials on tries of self-taught inventors to repeat experiments of Shamshurenkov or Kulibin) is widespread. But there are no works devoted to first attempts to describe the terminology of invented self-propelled structures. In this paper, the authors have tried to fill this gap and, as far as possible, to show how do imagine their inventions the creators Shamshurenkov and Kulibin. Analyzing the experience of Shamshurenkov in the creation of the horseless carriage authors relied on a deep study of engineer and technology historian E. I. Gagarin, who worked in Lomonosov Moscow Automotive Institute (now Moscow Polytechnic University).