On August 5, 1888, under the guise of visiting her mother, 39-year-old Bertha Benz took the first car on the first long-distance road trip and changed the auto world forever. Since women were not allowed to travel alone in those days, she took her two teenaged sons, Richard and Eugen, and slipped away in the early morning hours without telling her husband. This historic 12-hour, 66-mile ride from Mannheim to Pforzheim accomplished Bertha’s goal of stirring up publicity for her husband’s Model III, 1886 Benz Motorwagen, as well as demonstrating that road testing was the only way to prove real-world functionality for cars.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
When Carl Benz and Bertha Ringer were married in 1872, she was already a financial investor in his iron construction company that never quite took off. Once married, her substantial dowery became the funding behind their new company, Benz & Company,to support the development process of Carl’s invention, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a gasoline-powered, internal-combustion-engine automobile. Although Carl was a brilliant designer and engineer, Bertha added the dimensions of vision, ambition, and business acumen he lacked that finally brought the dream to market. She saw beyond the prototype to a vehicle that could be marketed to the general public.
In fact, Bertha was also intimately involved in the design of this car and its function, as evidenced by the several improvements she made to the car's design on that first test drive. In today’s world, she would have been a co-patent holder because of the extent of her involvement, but back then married women couldn’t apply for patents so Carl was the sole patent holder with Benz & Company.
Carl had received the patent in 1886 for his “horseless carriage” but for various reasons it stayed in the workshop as he continued to tinker with improvements. As a perfectionist, he was never quite satisfied with the design and lacked the confidence to show his car to the public. Additionally, social attitudes of the day disparaged Carl for building a “devil’s carriage,” based on the belief that any carriage not pulled by a house was considered the work of sorcery and witchcraft. With more faith in Carl's auto than he had and frustrated by her husband’s reticence to push forward, Bertha’s conviction that real-life tests were necessary to perfect the design propelled her to conduct the world’s first test drive. As a result of the notoriety and success of her historic venture, the Model III Benz Patent-Motorwagen became the first commercially available automobile, with 25 handmade production versions produced and sold for around $1,000, which would be around $30,000 today, a mid-priced car.
A journey powered by determination
Nowadays a 66-mile jaunt is nothing, but in 1888 it was quite a different story. Not only was the car untested outside the workshop, but there were no maps, few paved roads, no road signs, and no gas stations. Bertha and sons drove along uneven dirt wagon trails and followed railroad tracks as a guide since she was unsure of the route. She knew they would have to locate towns with pharmacies where she could buy fuel, or ligroin, a petroleum ether commonly known as benzene and sold as a cleaning fluid. Only available from chemists at the time, which is how the chemist in Wiesloch became the first gas station in the world.
Image Source: Wikipedia, http://www.zeno.org - Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH
The car itself was also challenging and broke down many times. She was her own mechanic and did roadside repairs in her petticoats and long skirts of the day’s fashion, instituting upgrades and repairs along the way. Two noted assists were getting a blacksmith to mend the broken drive chain at one point and having a cobbler install leather pads, creating the world's first pair of brake linings when the wooden brakes began to fail. Other factors of the car’s design and resultant problems she dealt with included:
The Benz Patent-Motorwagen was started by manually spinning the large flywheel at the rear. Undoubtedly the boys came in handy here.
It was two-rear-wheel drive, the front wheel solely for steering. A pair of chain drives linked by a simple beam axle delivered the power to the rear axle and a big leather strap operating on a single speed acted as the transmission.
Its two-and-a-half-horsepower engine meant the boys had to push the car up hills it couldn’t handle.
The car had no fuel tank and only a 4.5-litre supply of fuel in the carburetor (slightly over one gallon).
The engine often overheated as the water in the cooling system evaporated too quickly so they had to keep pouring water over it to cool it.
The engine often stalled, which Bertha diagnosed as bad fuel lines and she unclogged them with her hat pin.
The simple ignition system short circuited due to poor insulation on the ignition wire, and she fixed it with her garter.
The conquering heroine
When Bertha reached her mother’s home in Pforzheim in early evening, she sent a telegram to her husband telling him that his invention worked well enough, but it just needed a few upgrades. Returning to Mannheim after a few days, they began making the changes that would put the finishing touches on his automobile design. Carl added a low gear so it could climb hills, enhanced the braking system with brake pads, improved fuel line design, and refined other problematic systems to improve performance. Today, he’d have high-fived his wife and shouted, “Yes!” but in that era of flowery speech, he quoted in his memoirs this lovely praise for Bertha: “Only one person remained with me in the small ship of life when it seemed destined to sink. That was my wife. Bravely and resolutely, she set the new sails of hope."
The magnitude of Bertha’s contribution to automotive history is still evident today:
Extended test drives are an integral part of building and designing new automobiles to prove safety and performance.
In 2008, the Bertha Benz Memorial Route was officially approved as a route of industrial heritage and visitors can follow the signs of her route from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back.
In 2011, a television movie titled Carl & Bertha was made chronicling their lives and accomplishments.
Ulli Kampelmann produced a light-hearted documentary centering on Bertha’s road trip entitled, The Car is Born, where she points out that another first of this historic trip was that it was the first stolen car, taken without her husband’s knowledge. See the teaser here.
More and women and girls are becoming involved in the automotive world as designers, engineers, mechanics, and race car drivers. For more information on women who have been instrumental in shaping our world on wheels, check out Women in Automotive History.
You may be surprised at who you meet!