Charles Duryea

Charles Edgar Duryea (1861 to 1938) was an American engineer who, with his brother Frank, built one of the earliest working gasoline-powered automobiles in the United States. Born near Canton, Illinois, he spent most of his working life in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the brothers began as bicycle makers and then turned to motor vehicles, inspired by a Benz car Charles had seen at a fair in Ohio. In the usual division of labor Charles engineered the cars while Frank built, tested and raced them. Their motor wagon, a used horse-drawn buggy fitted with a four horsepower single-cylinder gasoline engine, was road-tested in September 1893, and a Duryea car won the first American horseless-carriage race in Chicago in November 1895. In 1896 the Duryea Motor Wagon Company hand-built thirteen cars, which Wikipedia calls the first commercially produced American vehicles. Charles ceased manufacturing in 1917, was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1973, and died in Philadelphia in 1938. The record of who built the first American gasoline car is contested, since the Smithsonian Institution previously credited Elwood Haynes with the first American gasoline automobile.