June 4 in Victorian History
What the Victorians were up to on this date, year by remarkable year.
1896
Ford's Quadricycle rolls down Bagley Avenue
At about four in the morning, 32-year-old Henry Ford — chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company by day, tinkerer by night — test-drives the gasoline automobile he built in a shed behind his Detroit home. The Quadricycle, a light frame on four bicycle wheels with a two-cylinder engine, is too wide for the shed door, so Ford takes an axe to the brickwork to get it out. The run succeeds; the Ford Motor Company follows in 1903.