![]() Canadian Alfred Horner Munro ended up with the patent to back-up his claim, a Canadian patent in 1923 followed by similar in the UK (1924) and United States (1927). Jumping forward to the 1920s, we find a genuine claimant to the title of being the inventor of the first automatic gearbox. Its was a little more reliable than the Panhard-Levassor invention, but let’s just say you wouldn’t want to set off on a journey in any vehicle using the Sturtevant transmission without having a good supply of items to use in case of a breakdown. It was a great idea in theory, less so in practice. Good in theory…Īll the way over in Boston, USA, the Sturtevant brothers were busy working on a two-speed automatic transmission that used centrifugal weights, these activated by the speed of the engine and automatically deactivating a clutch. ![]() They ended up talking through the theory of how it might work via a chalkboard demonstration. In France, Louis-Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor developed what they thought was a form of automatic transmission, but when they attempted to run a demonstration in 1894 the unit broke. Perhaps a key subtlety to consider is what we mean by the first automatic gearbox, is it the first project that could in any way be called an automatic gearbox or is it the first automatic gearbox you could look at and see a clear link with modern units? Let’s start the ignition and see where the joinery takes us as we try to answer that question – just who did invent the automatic gearbox? There is the first patented version of an automatic gearbox – this would seem a good answer if only the gearbox wasn’t so unrecognisable from what we see nowadays.įinally, there is the development of an automatic gearbox that came to define all future such units.Īs with so many major developments, the invention did not happen in isolation, an inventor suddenly unveiling their finished product, a product so perfect that it then became the standard for decades more. There are the early prototypes that hinted at a solution. The question of who invented the automatic gearbox has a number of potential answers with competing claims as to who holds the distinction. ![]()
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