The Duryea Motor Wagon was among the first standardized automobiles and among the first powered by gasoline. Fifteen Motor Wagons were built by the Duryea Motor Wagon Company company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, between 1893 and 1896.
Before this time, all automobiles were one-off individual models, The first commercially available automobile was patented by Karl Benz on January 29, 1886 and put into production in 1888.
It is not clear whether the Benz Velo or this vehicle was standardized first. The Duryea Motor Wagon remained in production until 1917.
The Duryea brothers entered their horseless carriage in many shows and races. The Duryea Motor Wagon carriage won the first prize in the first ever American automobile race Times-Herald race, a 54-mile course, in 1896. Duryeas also won first and second place in the Cosmopolitan Race on Decoration Day, 1896 in New York City. On November 14, 1896 they joined the Procession/Race from London to Brighton England.
The First Duryea
| Year | Engine | HP | Wheel size |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1893 | 1-cylinder | 4 | 54 |
Famous quotes containing the words motor and/or wagon:
“What shall we do with country quiet now?
A motor drones insanely in the blue
Like a bad bird in a dream.”
—Babette Deutsch (1895–1982)
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)