This album offers a visual history of the first 75 years of the motorcar, from the first Benz, through boom years, depression, and two world wars, up to the prosperity at the end of the 1950s. In January 1886, Karl Benz patented his Motorwagen, the world's first practical automobile, and during that same year proved that it worked. From Germany the motorcar spread to France, Britain, the rest of Europe and, in the early 1890s, to America. Created in a time of great technological innovation, the car opened up unexpected possibilities and, for better or worse, changed the world. In hundreds of captioned black and white photographs, depicting the products of Ford, Chrysler, Buick, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Austin, Morris, Rolls-Royce, Isetta, and Fiat, as well as many other makers long gone, this book shows how the car moved away from being the rich man's toy to the working man's tool, and finally the family man's runabout. The text is in English, German, and French.