Why do we have to switch gears to go faster? Why weren’t cars originally made to automatically do that?
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Did you ever ride a bike? To start moving you want a short (or light) gear, so that you can gain speed with a relatively low force on your pedals. A short gear, however, means that you’ll be spinning your pedals crazy fast at relatively low speeds already.
You also want to be able to move at a decent speed, so you’ll also want a long gear, which allows you to avoid having to spin the pedals too fast and still ride much faster than with the short gear you used to start.
Car’s combustion engines are the same, they don’t produce enough “force” to be able to make the car start moving with a very long gear. If you make one gear suited to start from a standstill, the engine will be spinning as fast as it can at a low speed. So you have several gears to make the best use of the range of “spinning” speeds that the engine works best with.
As with everything, simpler solution to problems are found and refined first. It took another couple of decades for manufacturers to master the added complexity of automatics and mass produce them. At that point, market specific needs caused the automatic transmission to become more or less widespread.
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