So, a simple balancing machine consisting of two equally sized wheels, a minimal metal frame, and a short drive chain emerged more than a century after Watt’s improved steam engines (1765), more than half a century after the introduction of mechanically far more complex locomotives (1829), years after the first commercial generation of electricity (1882)—but concurrently with the first designs of automobiles. The first light internal combustion engines were mounted on three- or four-wheel carriages by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach in 1886.
