The first speeding ticket was issued in 1896 to Walter Arnold in Kent, England for going 8 mph in a 2 mph zone, with police chasing him on a bicycle.
The first automobile is generally accepted as the Patent-Motorwagen, built by Carl Benz in 1885, a two-seat, 0.75-horsepower, single-cylinder, four-stroke engine with three wheels. In July of 1886, newspapers reported that it’d been seen for the first time on the streets around Mannheim, Germany. On September 21, 1893, brothers Frank and Charles Duryea drove what many considered to be the first automobile in America — an old horse-drawn wagon fitted with a four-horsepower, single-cylinder gasoline engine.
The automobile boom was off to the races, so to speak, and the world was forever changed. However, by all accounts, there were very few cars on the road in the late 1890s because each one had to be hand-built. This was still years before the Curved Dash Oldsmobile was first mass-produced in 1901. Until then, cars were, by and large, considered high-end luxury items (toys, if you will) for the rich and famous.
