Carl Benz

Carl Benz: The Man Who Built the First Real Car

On 5 August 1888 a woman took her husband's experimental machine out of the workshop, apparently without telling him, put her two sons aboard and drove sixty-five miles across Baden to visit her mother. She made repairs herself along the way; when the wooden brake blocks wore through on a long descent she stopped at a shoemaker and had him nail leather onto them, thereby inventing the brake lining. Bertha Benz's day out is the most consequential drive in history — and it rescued her husband, who had spent a decade being right and broke at the same time.

Mühlburg

He was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant on 25 November 1844 at Mühlburg, now part of Karlsruhe, the illegitimate son of Josephine Vaillant and a locomotive driver named Johann Georg Benz. His parents married soon after, which gave him the surname. When he was two his father died of pneumonia, leaving the family close to destitute. His mother spent what she had on his schooling, and it turned out to be the best investment anyone in the story ever made.

He was an exceptional pupil. At nine he entered Karlsruhe's scientifically oriented Lyceum; at fifteen, on 30 September 1860, he passed the entrance examination in mechanical engineering for the polytechnical school, where he studied under Ferdinand Redtenbacher, and graduated on 9 July 1864 aged nineteen. Then came seven years of professional failure — mechanical engineer in Karlsruhe, draughtsman at a Mannheim scales factory, bridge-building and ironwork in Pforzheim and Vienna. Nothing took.

Bertha's Dowry

In 1871 he set up an iron foundry and mechanical workshop in Mannheim with a partner, August Ritter, who proved unreliable; the tools were impounded and the business nearly died in its first year. It was rescued by his fiancée, Bertha Ringer, who used her dowry to buy out Ritter's share. They married on 20 July 1872 and had five children. She would rescue the enterprise at least twice more.

From 1878 Benz worked on engines. He completed a reliable two-stroke petrol engine on 31 December 1879 and patented it on 28 June 1880. Over the following years he patented, one by one, the pieces that a motor vehicle would need and that did not yet exist: a speed regulation system, battery ignition with sparks, the spark plug, the carburettor, the clutch, the gear shift and the water radiator.

Bankers forced his firm into a joint-stock company in 1882 and left him with five per cent of it. He walked out in 1883 and, with Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Eßlinger, founded Benz & Companie Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik — Benz & Cie. — building stationary gas engines with twenty-five employees.

The Patent Motor Car

Benz was a keen cyclist, and the vehicle he designed in 1885 borrowed from the bicycle: a light tubular steel frame, wire wheels, three of them because he had not solved steering for four. The single-cylinder four-stroke engine sat between the rear wheels — 116 mm bore, 160 mm stroke, 954 cc, producing about 0.8 horsepower for a top speed of 16 km/h. It had electric coil ignition, evaporative cooling, differential rear gears, and a crankshaft with balance weights. A first public attempt in 1885 ended against a wall because the tiller steering was hard to manage.

On 29 January 1886 he filed his patent application for a *Fahrzeug mit Gasmotorenbetrieb*, a vehicle with gas engine. Mercedes-Benz's own corporate history records the result as patent number 37435 and calls the machine the first automobile. On 3 July 1886 Benz drove it publicly on the Ringstrasse in Mannheim.

What made it different from every self-propelled contrivance before it was that the engine and the vehicle were designed together as one thing. Everyone else was strapping a motor to a carriage. Benz built an automobile.

Selling It

He was still failing commercially. Sales began in late summer 1888, making the Motorwagen the first automobile available for purchase anywhere, but the Model 2 had only two gears and could not climb a hill without being pushed. Then Bertha made her run to Pforzheim, wired the news of her arrival at nightfall, and put the machine on the front pages. She also came home with an engineering recommendation: it needed a third gear.

Things moved after that. The Model 3, with wooden wheels, appeared at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. Around twenty-five Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893. The Victoria followed, selling eighty-five in its first year, and then the Velocipede of 1894–1902, of which over 1,200 were made — arguably the first mass-produced car. In 1895 Benz built the first internal-combustion truck and the first motor buses, for the Netphener bus company. In 1896 he patented the horizontally opposed flat engine, a layout Porsche, Subaru and BMW Motorrad still use. By 1899 Benz & Cie. employed 430 people, produced 572 vehicles, and was the largest car manufacturer in the world.

Why Carl Is Called a Genius

The claim is for integrated engineering design, and it holds up unusually well. Benz did not invent the internal combustion engine. What he did was recognise, years ahead of anyone else, that a motor vehicle is not an engine plus a cart but a single system in which every component has to be invented to suit the others — and then he went out and invented them. The patent record is the evidence: the carburettor, the spark plug, battery ignition, the clutch, the gear shift, the water radiator, the speed regulator. Each of those is a separate act of invention, and each was necessary before the assembled thing could work. Then he designed the 1885 vehicle from the frame outward, borrowing from the bicycle rather than the carriage because he was thinking about weight and rigidity, not about tradition. He was still innovating a decade later with the flat engine, which remains in production today.

The counter-case is worth being precise about. Others — Daimler and Maybach most obviously — were working the same problem at the same time, and the two efforts appear to have been genuinely independent; there is no evidence Benz and Daimler knew of each other's early work. Benz's practical judgment outside engineering was poor: he lost control of his first company to bankers, and his own directors hired French designers over his head, prompting him to resign from design management on 24 January 1903. The commercial breakthrough came from his wife's publicity stunt, not his salesmanship, and the improvement that made the car usable in hilly country — a third gear — was her suggestion. And by 1900 the technical lead had passed to Maybach's Mercedes-35hp. Benz was the first to make it work, not the one who made it best.

Legacy

Karlsruhe gave him an honorary doctorate on his seventieth birthday, 25 November 1914. In 1906 he founded C. Benz Söhne at Ladenburg with his son Eugen. In 1926 Benz & Cie. merged with Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form Daimler-Benz, and every car the combined firm made was called a Mercedes-Benz; the new badge fused Daimler's three-pointed star with the laurel wreath from the Benz insignia. He wrote his memoirs in 1925, *Lebensfahrt eines deutschen Erfinders*, and died at his Ladenburg home of bronchial inflammation on 4 April 1929, aged eighty-four. Bertha lived on in the same house until 1944.

He entered the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1984 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. Since 2008 the road Bertha took has been the signposted Bertha Benz Memorial Route. Both honours are apt: the machine was his, but it took the two of them to get it on the road.

Achievements

• National Inventors Hall of Fame — 2022
• Educated at University of Karlsruhe
• Worked as engineer and inventor