Why do boys' bicycles have high top bars and girls' bicycles do not? The reason for the differences goes back to 1889 when Britain's Queen Victoria made cycling fashionable for women. Even in the first half of this century, women and girls wore skirts and dresses more often than trousers, even when cycling. That is why the top bars were made lower on girls' bikes. However, a higher top bar makes a bike stronger. Who invented the car? The vehicle we now know as the car was continuously upgraded and modified over the past 200 years. The first car probably appeared in the late 1700s, although it bore little resemblance to the modern car and was steam-driven. French engineer Nicolas Joseph Cugnot is generally thought to have built the first car, or self-propelled vehicle, in Paris in 1789. It was a heavy, three-wheeled, steam-driven carriage with a boiler that projected at the front. In 1801, English engineer Richard Trevithick also built a three- wheeled, steam-driven car, with the rear wheels driven by the engine. Many more vehicles were developed in Britain, but at first they were not allowed on the road. The development of cars was later held back by excessive road and bridge tolls and bizarre legislation such as that which limited their speed to 6.4 kilometres per hour, which meant you could walk as fast as you could drive. It was not until the introduction of the internal combustion engine that development really under way again. Probably the first vehicle of this type was the three-wheeled car built in 1885 by engineer Karl Benz in Germany. Another German engineer, Gottlieb Daimler, built an improved version of the internal combustion engine around the same year. In 1894, the Daimler Company introduced the Panhard car in France, which had many features of the modern car. In the United States, similar cars were also manufactured in the 1890s.
