The first inventors to build automobiles lived in Europe, but the United States rapidly coopted their inventions to become the world's preeminent car culture. Over the course of the twentieth century, Americans completely reorganized the country's built environment to accommodate a technological system of universal car ownership, an extensive network of high quality roads, and a well developed automobile service industry. By mid-century, automobiles had become the country's primary mode of transportation, replacing horses, railroads, and urban mass transit systems. At the same time, automobiles became objects of cultural disagreement, praise, humor, symbolism, status, and innumerable hopes and fears. More than providing a way to move around, over the course of the twentieth century automobiles became a central defining characteristic of American culture.

From the 1890s forward, designers of horseless carriages spent a great deal of time in their backyard workshops building the experimental prototypes that introduced the...