Karl Benz

Karl Benz was a German engine designer and car engineer, generally regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile, and together with Bertha Benz pioneering founder of the automobile manufacturer Mercedes-Benz. Other German contemporaries, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach working as partners, also worked on similar types of inventions, without knowledge of the work of the other, but Benz patented his work first, and, subsequently patented all the processes that made the internal combustion engine feasible for use in an automobile. In 1879 his first engine patent was granted to him and in 1886 Benz was granted a patent for his first automobile.

Karl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant, in 1844 in Mühlburg, now a borough of Karlsruhe, Baden, which is part of modern Germany, to Josephine Vaillant and a locomotive driver, Johann George Benz, whom she married a few months later. When he was two years old, his father was killed in a railway accident, and his name was changed to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father.

Despite living in near poverty, his mother strove to give him a good education. Benz attended the local Grammar School in Karlsruhe and was a prodigious student. In 1853, at the age of nine he started at the scientifically oriented Lyceum. Next he studied at the Poly-Technical University under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher.

Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but eventually followed his father's steps toward locomotive engineering. On September 30, 1860, at age fifteen, he passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, which he subsequently attended. Benz was graduated July 9, 1864 at nineteen.

During these years, while riding his bicycle, he started to envision concepts for a vehicle that would eventually become the horseless carriage.

Following his formal education, Benz had seven years of professional training in several companies, but did not fit well in any of them. The training started in Karlsruhe with two years of varied jobs in a mechanical engineering company.

He then moved to Mannheim to work as a draftsman and designer in a scales factory. In 1868 he went to Pforzheim to work for a bridge building company Gebrüder Benckiser Eisenwerke und Maschinenfabrik. Finally, he went to Vienna for a short period to work at an iron construction company.

If ever a man depended on the energy of his spouse to pull him through, Karl Friedrich Benz was he. To speak about Karl Benz without mentioning his wife Bertha Benz, nee Ringer, is telling only half the story.

Karl Friedrich Benz was a typical inventor, grand in his ideas, a wonderful craftsman, but hopeless in business matters. Bertha Ringer believed in Karl's ability much more than he did.

While he was torn by doubts on the direction he should take, she had none. He nearly lost his little mechanics shop to an associate until Bertha, then his fiancee, came along with a dowry prematurely cajoled from her parents.

Whenever the little gas engine in the tricycle that Karl built failed, Bertha would buck him up. When he wanted to give up the quest for the carriage that didn't need horses, she pushed him to continue. To finance the development, she saw to it that the mechanics shop got some jobs.

At last, on January 29, 1886, Karl registered his patent DRP 37435, for a three-wheeler with a four-stroke 0.9 PS engine. DRP 37435 today is recognized as the official birth certificate of the motor car.

But rich people, who should have bought the vehicle, doubted its reliability. The resolute Bertha came up with a grand public relations idea: a woman and two children all alone on a long distance tour. In those times, it was an un-heard of adventure. On an August morning in 1888, while her husband was occupied with other things, Bertha packed up their two sons, aged 14 and 15, swung herself into the driver's seat and drove 100 kilometers on rough roads from Mannheim to Pforzheim near Stuttgart. The expedition arrived just when the sun was setting.

By telegram she and the boys let the father know that they had successfully completed the first long distance trip in the history of the automobile.

The tale of the unbelievable adventure spread quickly and ignited wild conjectures on who in the world had helped this woman. It was grand publicity, and the business began to thrive.

But as the industry grew and changed, Karl Benz did not. He would have nothing to do with fast-running engines or with vehicles other than motorized horse carriages. Benz & Cie was in danger of losing its world leadership in car building at the turn of the 20th century, but Karl Benz saved the firm again, this time by resigning in 1903.

Benz died in his house in Mannheim 26 years later, three years after his Benz & Cie was joined with Daimler Motorengesellschaft, and 29 years after the death of Gottlieb Daimler, a man he never met.

In his autobiography Karl Benz wrote: "In those days when our little boat of life threatened to capsize, only one person stood steadfastly by me, my wife. She bravely set new sails of hope." Bertha, the resolute, died aged 95 in 1944.

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