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Okla-homey
4/1/2007, 07:47 AM
April 1, 1857...World's first use of internal combustion to power a vehicle

http://aycu22.webshots.com/image/13861/2002415006895896177_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2002415006895896177)
Antonio "Tony" Veranicci, photo c. 1910

Precisely 150 years ago today, on this day in 1857, in the northern Italian village of Gassachio, Antonio Guiseppi Veranicci, the son of a shoemaker conducted the world's first public demonstration of an internal combustion engine adapted to a vehicle.

Veranicci received only a meager primary education in the village school, but from early childhood, had shown an amazing aptitude for mechanical things. At age seven, he designed a cantilevered windlass winch that made drawing water from the village well much easier for the women and children of the village.

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Veranicci's winch

In later childhood, Veranicci designed and built a mechanical plow-sharpening device for use by local farmers which allowed them to keep their expensive steel plowshares in service much longer despite repeated stone strikes as they created furrows in the rocky soil around Gassachio.

In fact, Antonio Veranicci (called "Tony" by most in the village) had become so reknowned in the area for being able to repair virtually anythng mechanical, was often hailed by his fellow villagers by the Italian equivalent of the English phrase, "fix it again Tony?"

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Veranicci's gasoline powered farm wagon.

Veranicci's most important creation was his adapation of a gasoline powered two-stroke engine to a farm wagon. The result was a vehicle capapble of carrying substantial loads at a speed of 12 mph. Locals were impressed, but preferred not to purchase these vehicles in any numbers fearing their noise and constant breakdowns would merely result in repeated indebtedness to Veranicci, since he was the only person in the region who could keep them running.

Thus, Veranicci's name as the inventor of the first practical gasoline powered vehicle was was virtually lost to history. That changed in 1911 when
Veranicci's service to his people, and his marvelous mechanical ability were memorialized forever, when the Italian carmaker FIAT was established in the that year.

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The name was chosen expressly because it was acronym for those words the northern Italian people used on meeting Veranicci --"Fix It Again Tony?"

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And today is also APRIL FOOLS!;)