At the turn of the last century, the battle was on to perfect the technology that would power the automobile.

A few different means of powering cars were attempted. Naturally, gas-powered engines were one of them. Amongst them, though, was an electric car and even a car powered by a steam engine. (Early inventors seemed to regard cars as "little trains".)

The electric car didn't take off because, at the time, a battery that could fit into a car couldn't hold a charge to travel great distances. And steam engines were too large and bulky to work in an automobile targeted at the average consumer. By process of elimination, Henry Ford started mass producing cars that ran on gasoline.

The interesting thing about this is that there was no central authority that reached this conclusion. No one sat down around a conference table and made a decision. No one weighed the pros and cons of each particular idea against one another and then used that information to arrive at a logical conclusion. What happened simply happened, as a part of the gradual process of the rising demand for automobiles. And the results of this process have struck around for more than a century.

What happens next in the realm of automobile propulsion will probably be based the same messy, inexact, mysterious process of the market moving slowly over the next ten years.