Opposite page: details of the 1896 German patent that confirmed Benz’ s original thinking, together with the man himself on a Patent-Motorwagen, pictured in 1925 when he was 81.
Right: Benz at the tiller of his Patent- Motorwagen in 1896.
Throughout the following seven years Benz built some 25 evolutionary automobiles, with several sold to the public after he appointed Emile Roger of Paris as his first sales agent in 1889. So, however loose this term must inevitably be, his mobility machines became the world’ s first‘ series production cars’.
Carl’ s wife, the ever-supportive Bertha Benz( they married on 20 July 1872) did so much more than simply mop his troubled brow. Beyond financing the launch of his business, she later played a crucial part in demonstrating her husband’ s incredible work in her role as the world’ s first female driver. There were plenty of naysayers around the idea of personal motoring, and one August day in 1888 Bertha decided to prove them wrong.
Allegedly without his knowledge, she took his latest Patent-Motorwagen on what, for the time, was an astonishing journey. Along with her two sons, 15-year old Eugen and 14-year old Richard, she drove the car 66 miles from Mannheim to her family’ s hometown, Pforzheim. With the return journey, it was an odyssey of around 124 miles, including quite a few detours along unpaved roads, plus a stop at a chemist’ s shop to refuel with petrol, and took 12 hours. It was risky and probably illegal; and we will never know whether Carl was beside himself with worry or not when he discovered the car and family were missing. However, the resulting report in the Illustrirte Zeitung newspaper
in December that year went a long way towards making the motor car acceptable to society as a practical proposition.
Carl’ s innovations kept on coming. One of the most important was his patented double-pivot steering of 1893, and this made its debut in the 3 hp Victoria model that year, for which sales momentum started to build. However, it was the much-improved successor to the Patent-Motorwagen, the 1894 four-wheeled Benz Velo, that really took off. This was a relatively affordable car that was lightweight and quite rugged. With some 1200 examples sold up to 1901, it was one of the first volume-produced cars of all time. The horizontally-opposed twin-cylinder engine arrived in 1897, yet another step on the way to Benz & Cie. becoming the world’ s leading motor manufacturer by the dawn of the 20th century.
Carl Benz lived until 1929, long enough to see the formation of the Mercedes-Benz marque that prospers to this day, following a merger between the Benz and Daimler / Mercedes companies in 1926. He was 84. Bertha Benz died in 1944 at the grand old age of 95. They were Mr and Mrs Motor Car. Just contemplate the car world that all sprang from the Patent- Motorwagen; it surely says something that the house where the inventive Carl Benz was born in Karlsruhe had to be demolished in the 1950s.
To widen the road.-
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