Putt putt, bang bang.

Date: March 6, 1896. Time: About 11 p.m. Place: Detroit's lower east side.

It was on that cold, snowy night that the first horseless carriage made its appearance on the streets of Detroit.

Charles Brady King designed and assembled the machine -- some would call it a contraption -- in John Lauer's machine shop on St. Antoine Street south of Jefferson Avenue. Instead of a steering wheel, it had a tiller.

King's maiden voyage was a short one. From the machine shop, he turned left on Jefferson and headed west to Woodward Avenue, then hung a right and chugged up about three blocks to the Russell House, the city's leading hotel, on Cadillac Square.

There the engine conked out, and the machine was towed back to Lauer's shop. The first round trip, such as it was, spanned less than two miles.

In a back-page article the next day, the Detroit Free Press reported: "The apparatus seems to work all right, and it went at the rate of five or six miles hour at an even rate of speed."

Meanwhile, a night shift engineer at the Edison Illuminating Co. (today's Detroit Edison Co.) was working on his own horseless carriage -- he called it a quadricycle -- in his spare time in a small brick shed at the rear of his rented, two-family home on Bagley Avenue. His name was Henry Ford.

Ford completed his work on June 4, 1896, and immediately hit a snag. Because the machine was bigger than the door, Ford had to knock out part of the shed's wall to get it out on the street.

It's unlikely that either King or Ford had any idea at the time that they were launching a global industry, and neither man was the first to produce automobiles in Detroit. That distinction belonged to Ransom E. Olds of Lansing. Olds founded the Olds Motor Works and began producing vehicles in a small factory on East Jefferson Avenue near the Belle Isle Bridge. When the plant was destroyed by fire on March 9, 1901, Olds decided to pack up and move back to Lansing to produce a smaller, cheaper vehicle.

Charles Brady King chose to pursue other interests, but Henry Ford continued to improve his machine and decided to begin producing cars in quantity. After several false starts, he was finally able to obtain financial backing for a new company. The Ford Motor Co. was incorporated on June 16, 1903, and production began in a factory on Mack Avenue.

This is the 15th in a series of historical sketches commemorating Detroit's 300th birthday this year. Henry Ford's horseless carriage and the shed where it was built are both on display at Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village in Dearborn.