Perusing the Wisconsin Historical Society's image archive recently, we came across the above photo of a rather significant event: Inventor Otto Zachow sits on the back of the shaft-drive steam-powered Z&B, his first four-wheel-drive vehicle, in Clintonville, Wisconsin.

Indeed, Zachow and his brother-in-law, William Besserdich, would within a couple of years found the Four Wheel Drive Automobile Company there in Clintonville (known in an early iteration as the Badger Four Wheel Drive Automobile Company) and become the world's largest producer of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Yet the Z&B was not the first four-wheel-drive vehicle, as stated in the photo's caption.

Let's start with the date. Wisconsin Historical Society places it circa 1909, though most sources claim the Z&B was built in 1908. From Zachow and Besserdich's patents (U.S. patents 907,940 and 882,986, both issued in 1908) that much of their work in developing the four-wheel-drive design seems to have taken place in the summer of 1907.

Then there was Charles E. Cotta, of Shannon, Illinois, who filed his patent for a chain-drive four-wheel-drive vehicle (U.S. Patent 652,949) in January 1900 (followed by U.S. Patent 700,175 in October of that year, both of them also four-wheel-steering designs).

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