Nicolas Joseph Cugnot
NicolasJoseph Cugnot was a French inventor. He is known to have built the first working selfpropelled mechanical vehicle, the worlds first automobile. This claim is disputed by some sources, however, which suggest that Ferdinand Verbiest, as a member of a Jesuit mission in China, may have been the first to build, around 1672, a steampowered vehicle but that was too small to carry a driver or passengers.
Cugnot was born in VoidVacon, Lorraine, , France. He trained as a military engineer. He experimented with working models of steamenginepowered vehicles for the French Army, intended for transporting cannons, starting in 1765.
Source: Wikipedia