The ensuing trench warfare, which ended the usefulness of armoured cars, brought forth new proposals for tracked armoured vehicles. Its opening stage of mobile warfare accelerated the development of armoured cars, numbers of which were quickly improvised in Belgium, France, and Britain. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 radically changed the situation. Two years later a fully armoured car with a turret was built in France by the Société Charron, Girardot et Voigt, and another was built concurrently in Austria by the Austro-Daimler Company. Such a vehicle was constructed to the order of Vickers, Sons and Maxim Ltd. The inevitable next step was a vehicle that was both armed and armoured. Simms mounted a machine gun in 1899 in England. The first motor vehicle used as a weapon carrier was a powered quadricycle on which F.R. Thus, the first self-propelled armoured vehicle was built in 1900 in England when John Fowler & Company armoured one of their steam traction engines for hauling supplies in the South African (Boer) War (1899–1902). By then the basis for them had become available with the appearance of the traction engine and the automobile. The two ideas began to merge in the battle cars proposed in 1335 by Guido da Vigevano, in 1484 by Leonardo da Vinci, and by others, down to James Cowen, who took out a patent in England in 1855 for an armed, wheeled, armoured vehicle based on the steam tractor.īut it was only at the beginning of the 20th century that armoured fighting vehicles began to take practical form. The concept of protected vehicles can be traced back through the wheeled siege towers and battering rams of the Middle Ages to similar devices used by the Assyrians in the 9th century bce. The use of vehicles for fighting dates to the 2nd millennium bce, when horse-drawn war chariots were used in the Middle East by the Egyptians, Hittites, and others as mobile platforms for combat with bows and arrows.
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