[astrodust]

There was a time when it was laughable that the "automobile" would ever replace the horse. It broke down constantly, it had such anemic engine power that it could barely get up a hill, and the manufacturers of these vehicles were just a bunch of people in a ramshackle garage.

Yet somehow we made it work.

[dredmorbius]

Large reserves of liquid petroleum were first proven viable in 1869. Even then, supplies were uncertain in the US until 1930, at which point the largest onshore find in the lower-48 states to that time and the present was discovered, the East Texas Oil Field.

Initially used for lamps (Standard Oil was founded as an illumination company), motive power wasn't practical (aside from as an alternative to coal or wood for steam engines* until Nikolaus Otto perfected the four-stroke engine in 1876. Daimler started his own company in 1880, but didn't perfect a transport-capable engine until 1885.

Within 25 years, Henry Ford was selling Tin Lizzies to anyone who could come up with $260 in cash. Numbers of automobiles and companies exploded.

And yet total patents filed not only plateaued by 1925, but fell afterward. Not all the hard problems had been solved, but many were, and there's been comparatively little qualitative improvement in automobiles in the subsequent 90 years, particularly as compared with the 50 preceding.

From first inception to mass consumer product was the blink of an eye considering all of historical innovation in transport previously. We saw 6,000 years of transport expertise obsoleted within a generation.