The belly of the beast, of course, was the groundbreaking, compact, internal-combustion engine itself. Its four-stroke combustion cycle would become the car industry’ s world standard for more than 100 years to come, and it was mounted horizontally at the back, with its single cylinder punching backwards and forwards as it was fired by another clever Benz idea: a‘ spark plug’ triggered by high-voltage electrical vibrator ignition.
The single-speed transmission engaged drive via a lever on the side of the wooden bench seat, that pulled a tough leather strap to operate an open-drive disc. At which point, a pair of chains would turn the simple beam axle and those spindly wheels would rotate. Self-propulsion was duly achieved.
To stop the vehicle shaking itself to pieces, a large counter-rotating flywheel was included, while an oildripping system manually operated using three taps under the seat kept the engine lubricated. Along with its evaporation-based cooling, this was a fantastically advanced piece of genius, with so many of the issues that would eventually impact every motorist tackled on day one. Other systems were a lot more basic, such as the elliptic spring suspension, the geared tiller steering, and braking by a leather-covered wooden block to jam against the countershaft to slow it down.
The vehicle’ s power output was also rather feeble, at three-quarters of one brake horsepower. On the
other hand, it was also the most powerful car of all, being the first and only one. Completed in 1885, there was no other‘ vehicle powered by a gas engine’( as stated in its patent) like it.
Six months later, on 3 July 1886, the Benz Patent- Motorwagen was given its first public demonstration, as Carl Benz finally drove it out of the workshop yard and on to the streets of Mannheim. It was noisy and smelt of oil, while the suspension didn’ t do much to soak up the shocks from the road surface. But it worked and captivated onlookers. No-one had seen anything like it.
The company was forced to move to bigger premises on Waldhofstrasse that year. Not on account of the new‘ auto-mobile’ but because of booming demand for its stationary engines. Benz & Cie. was soon Germany’ s second-largest manufacturer of them. Carl Benz, meanwhile, had the headspace to refine his Patent-Motorwagen, and immediately set about making more powerful versions with 1.5 and 2 hp engines. He must surely have been aware of potential rivals, especially after Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, formerly of the Deutz company, lodged their own patent application in August 1886 for their fourwheeled Motorwagen. The pair worked in Cannstatt, now a district of Stuttgart, just 62 miles as the crow flies from Benz.
22 The London to Brighton Veteran Car Run