The first attempts to manufacture an internal combustion engine started in VIII century. and were complicated by the lack of an appropriate type of fuel, especially liquid, and early engines used a gas mixture.

In 1806, a Swiss engineer, Francois Isaac de Rivas, assembled an engine that worked on a hydrogen-oxygen mixture. Samuel Brown, an Englishman, experimented on his own hydrogen-fueled engine in 1826, and in 1859 Etienne Lenier created the first working example of an internal combustion engine. Around 1870 in Vienna, because of explosion of unintentionally burned air mass with a high concentration of gasoline vapors inventor Siegfried Marcus was enlighten with the idea of using gasoline as a fuel. Creating the world's first gasoline-powered engine, he placed it on an ordinary cart and became the first person who filled his car's tank with liquid fuel. Today, this vehicle is known as the "first Marcus machine".

In 1879 the German inventor Carl Benz designed a two-stroke internal combustion engine, and later, in 1885 in Mannheim, Benz built his first car (pictured three-wheeled Benz' Motorwagen), for which in a short while he obtained a patent and began serial production of automobiles.