The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology

In 1893, two brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts built something that would reshape the modern world: the first successful American gasoline-powered automobile. Donald H. Berkebile's slim volume documents this pivotal machine now housed in the Smithsonian, tracing the engineering leaps and manual labor that transformed brass fittings and a single-cylinder engine into a vehicle that actually moved under its own power. The Duryea brothers, Charles and Frank, beat Henry Ford and Ransom Olds to the punch by nearly a decade, yet their story remains one of automotive history's most overlooked origin points. Berkebile examines the technical specifications, the iterative development process, and the cultural context of late 19th-century American ingenuity that made such a breakthrough possible. This is not a glossy coffee-table book but a serious historical document, originally published in the mid-20th century, that speaks to anyone curious about the raw, scrappy beginnings of the machine that would define the 20th century.