SEIGFRIED MARCUS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 110, 31 December 1931, Page 2

SEIGFRIED MARCUS

It is just one hundred years since Seigried Marcus, whom -Austria claims as the inventor of the motof car, was born. As a young man he came from the little Mecklenburg town of Malekin to Vienna, and studied and settled down there, opening his own shop as "a mechanieian in 1860. There is a rival claimant in the French Jean Lenoir, who eonstructed a self-moving vehicle in 1860. But his car was driyen by coal gas, while Marcus's first car, four years later, used oil (benzine). This first machine was useless for the street, but gradually the inventor improved on it, and the much-im-proved edition of 1875 is still on show at the Yienna Technical Museum. Marcus drove about in it, but the police objected to the new vehicle in consequence of the noise it made. This discouragement, added to lack of financial assistance and illness, caused him to discontinue the work, but in 1898, at the Jubilee Exhibition at the Rotunde the Austrian Automobile Club showed his historic car, testifying to his having been the originator of the modern automobile. Marcus died in the summer of that year.