The Real Beginning of the Automobile Age and a Woman Driver

 

Karl Benz, creator of the first modern internal combustion engine automobile, demonstrates a prototype Motorwagen.

On July 3, 1886 inventor Karl Benz rolled his latest creation, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a light weight three wheeled carriage powered by an internal combustion engine of his own design onto the streets of Manheim for its first public demonstration.

There had been self-propelled road vehicles since Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s lumbering Fardier à vapeur, a heavy cart built to haul artillery for the French Army in 1769.  Since then dozens of steam powered vehicles had been built and/or proposed.  By the 1880’s Amédée Bollée of Le Mans was producing large, multi-passenger coaches and de Dion & Bouton were turning out light weight tri and quadricycles.  But Benz’s gasoline powered Motorwagan is considered the first modern automobile and the direct ancestor of all that came that came after.  

Benz's heiress wife Bertha financed her husband's inventions and we a shrewd businesswoman in her own right.

Benz, a successful engineer and developer of stationary engines for industrial applications, was financed by his heiress wife Bertha, a woman of strong mind and keen intellect in her own right who would be deeply involved in advising her husband on business matters.  Benz’s German patent dated from his application on January 29 of that year.

Key to the tricycle was the light weight gasoline powered two-stroke piston engine that he had patented back in 1873.  The version he mounted on his Motorwagen was a  954 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine with trembler coil ignition which produced 2⁄3 horsepower (hp) 250 rpm—about the same power as a modern walk-behind self-propelled lawnmower engine.  But it was powerful enough to propel the very light vehicle built on a tubular steel frame with thin wood panels.  Each of the three wheels, specially designed by Benz, had wire steel spokes and hard rubber tires.  The freely rotating single front wheel was steered by a tiller by a driver seated in front of the engine.

A museum replica of the Patent Moterwagan.

The engine drove the two rear wheels with a chain drive on both sides. A simple belt system served as a single-speed transmission, varying torque between an open disc and drive disc. A large horizontal flywheel stabilized the engine power output.

That first put-putting prototype strikes us as not quite finished.  There was an open crankcase  into which oil dripped from an open pan on critical moving parts.  Similarly there was neither a sealed gas tank as we know it nor a carburetor.  Gasoline (or another suitably combustible fluid) dripped from a small reservoir into a basin of soaked fibers that supplied a vapor to the cylinder by evaporation.  There were also no brakes.

But Benz was not finished tinkering.  Over the next year he built two more improved models.  By the time of his Model 3 Motorwagen, it was powered by a new 2 hp engine capable of getting the vehicle up to a dizzying 10 miles per hour.  It also had a real carburetor, gas tank, and manually operated brakes on the rear wheels.

All of these prototypes were all well and good, but perhaps Mrs. Benz was a trifle anxious for her investment to start paying off with sales.  She recognized that the public interest had been piqued but was far from convinced that the Motorwagen was a practical means of transportation.  The shrewd and intrepid Bertha realized something more dramatic needed to be done.

Bertha Benz and her teenage sons posed for a photo, seen here tinted, recreating the beginning of her historic drive.

In early August 1888 supposedly without her husband’s permission—some historians doubt this claim—she gathered up her two sons, ages 15 and 14 and took the Model 3 out for a spin.  A trip actually, all the way from Mannheim to her mother’s home in Pforzheim a about 60 miles away.  The drive took her through the streets of Heidelberg and Wiesloch.  The sight of a woman and two children zipping through the streets in a noisy, smoky contraption with no horse naturally attracted considerable attention.

Bertha was not only the driver and navigator, but the mechanic as well.  When the carburetor clogged, she had no problem clearing it with her hat pin and she used her garter to insulate an exposed wire.  When fuel ran low and no gasoline was available she purchased ligroin, a petroleum ether related to benzene, at the Wiesloch municipal pharmacy.  Later when the wooden block of her brakes wore down, she found a cobbler to nail strips of leather on them, thus inventing brake pads on the fly.

Bertha made it safely to her mother’s by evening and sent husband a famous telegram explaining her whereabouts and how she got there.  The next morning she drove home.  She had proved the automobile was a reliable transportation option and that it could even be operated by an unsupervised woman.  And as she hoped, the trip generated sales.

Afterwards her husband, at Bertha’s suggestion, made brake pads standard equipment and added a second gear for aid in climbing hills.

An early ad for the Patent-Motorwagen featured an illustration of Benz at the tiller.

Over the next few years until 1893 about 25 Motorwagens were built and sold before Benz moved on to more sophisticated models.

Three years before Karl Benz died in 1929 he merged his Benz & Cie company with Gottlieb Daimler’s Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form what would become Mercedes-Benz.

Bertha Benz’ investment paid off.  When she died at age 95 in 1944 she was a very wealthy woman indeed.

The route she took on her memorable 1888 drive has been named the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.

 

The Real Birth of the Automobile Age and a Woman Driver

Karl Benz, creator of the first modern internal combustion engine automobile.

On July 3, 1886 inventor Karl Benz rolled his latest creation, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a light weight three wheeled carriage powered by an internal combustion engine of his own design onto the streets of Manheim for its first public demonstration.

There had been self-propelled road vehicles since Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s lumbering Fardier à vapeur, a heavy cart built to haul artillery for the French Army in 1769.  Since then dozens of steam powered vehicles had been built and/or proposed.  By the 1880’s Amédée Bollée of Le Mans was producing large, multi-passenger coaches and de Dion & Bouton were turning out light weight tri and quadricycles.  But Benz’s gasoline powered Motorwagan is considered the first modern automobile and the direct ancestor of all that came that came after. 

Benz's heiress wife Bertha financed her husband's inventions and we a shrewd businesswoman in her own right.

Benz, a successful engineer and developer of stationary engines for industrial applications, was financed by his heiress wife Bertha, a woman of strong mind and keen intellect in her own right who would be deeply involved in advising her husband on business matters.  Benz’s German patent dated from his application on January 29 of that year.

Key to the tricycle was the light weight gasoline powered two-stroke piston engine that he had patented back in 1873.  The version he mounted on his Moterwagen was a  954 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine with trembler coil ignition which produced 2⁄3 horsepower (hp) 250 rpm, producing about the same power as a modern walk-behind self-propelled lawnmower engine.  But it was powerful enough to propel the very light vehicle built on a tubular steel frame with thin wood panels.  Each of the three wheels, specially designed by Benz, had wire steel spokes and hard rubber tires.  The freely rotating single front wheel was steered by a tiller by a driver seated in front of the engine.

A museum replica of the Patent Moterwagan 

The engine drove the two rear wheels with a chain drive on both sides. A simple belt system served as a single-speed transmission, varying torque between an open disc and drive disc. A large horizontal flywheel stabilized the engine power output.

That first put-putting prototype strikes us as not quite finished.  There was an open crankcase.  Into which oil dripped from an open pan on critical moving parts.  Similarly there was neither a sealed gas tank as we know it or a carburetor.  Gasoline (or another suitably combustible fluid) dripped from a small reservoir into a basin of soaked fibers that supplied a vapor to the cylinder by evaporation.  There were also no brakes.

But Benz was not finished tinkering.  Over the next year he built two more improved models.  By the time of his Model 3 Moterwagen, it was powered by a new 2 hp engine capable of getting the vehicle up to a dizzying 10 miles per hour.  It also had a real carburetor, gas tank, and manually operated brakes on the rear wheels.

All of these prototypes were all well and good, but perhaps Mrs. Benz was a trifle anxious for her investment to start paying off with sales.  She recognized that the public interest had been piqued, but was far from convinced that the Moterwagen was a practical means of transportation.  The shrewd and intrepid Bertha realized something more dramatic need be done.

Bertha Benz and her teenage sons posed for a photo, seen here tinted, recreating the beginning of her historic drive.

In early August 1888 supposedly without her husband’s permission—some historians doubt this claim—she gathered up her two sons, ages 15 and 14 and took the Model 3 out for a spin.  A trip actually, all the way from Mannheim to her mother’s home in Pforzheim, a trip of about 60 miles which took her through the streets of Heidelberg and Wiesloch.  The sight of a woman and two children zipping through the streets in a noisy, smoky contraption with no horse naturally attracted considerable attention.

Bertha was not only the driver and navigator, but the mechanic as well.  When the carburetor clogged, she had no problem clearing it with her hat pin and she used her garter to insulate an exposed wire.  When fuel ran low and no gasoline was available she purchased ligroin, a petroleum ether related to benzene, at the Wiesloch municipal pharmacy.  Later when the wooden block of her brakes wore down, she found a cobbler to nail strips of leather on them, thus inventing brake pads on the fly.

Bertha made it safely to her mother’s by evening and sent husband a famous telegram explaining her whereabouts and how she got there.  The next morning she drove home.  She had proved the automobile was a reliable transportation option and that it could even be operated by an unsupervised woman.  And as she hoped, the trip generated sales.

Afterwards her husband, at Bertha’s suggestion made brake pads standard equipment and added a second gear for aid in climbing hills.

An early ad for the Patent-Motorwagen featured an illustration of Benz at the tiller.

Over the next few years until 1893 about 25 Moterwagens were built and sold before Benz moved on to more sophisticated models.

Three years before Karl Benz died in 1929 he merged his Benz & Cie company with Gottlieb Daimler’s Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form what would become Mercedes-Benz.

Bertha Benz’ investment paid off.  When she died at age 95 in 1944 she was a very wealthy woman indeed.

The route she took on her memorable 1888 drive has been named the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.

Thanksgiving, Snow and Chicago—First U.S. Auto Race Takes Off

Frank Duryea in his Motor Wagon, winner of the Chicago Times-Herald Thanksgiving Day Race in 1895, the first ever in the U.S.A.  Note the slush on the streets.

The first automobile race in the United States was held in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1895. 

Chicago was always a tough newspaper town.  A half a dozen or more daily papers scrambled to survive, in the shadow of Joseph Medill’s Chicago Daily Tribune.  In 1895 the Chicago Times, a struggling Democratic paper in a city dominated by Republicans since the Civil War, had recently merged with another also-ran in the newspapers wars, the Chicago Herald. 

H. H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the new Chicago-Times Herald was looking for a way to build circulation and challenge the mighty Tribune.  Looking around for something new and exciting, they hit upon those new-fangled horseless carriages that various tinkerers were beginning to produce by hand in tiny shops.  Most people had never seen one and those who had found them noisy and ridiculous looking.  Hardly anyone thought there was a future in them.  But in a country that had recently undergone the revolutions of electrical and telephone services, nothing could be dismissed out of hand. 

On July 9, 1895 the Times-Herald announced that it would give a whopping $5,000 to the winner of a Moto-cycle race between Chicago and Milwaukee.  The hefty prize indeed stirred interest.  Over 80 entry applications were turned in, many of them for cars that had not even yet been built or were still under construction.  Originally slated for late summer, a number of problems caused a series of postponements.

The final route of the race from a 1945 50th anniversary account of the race.

First, there proved to be no good route to Milwaukee.  In an era when trade between the cities was conducted by rail and Lake Michigan freighters, there was no single road connecting the two cities.  Various routes patched through country lanes proved, even in August, one of the driest months of the year, to be muddy and impassable.  The route was changed to at 54 mile round trip from what had been the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (now the Museum of Science and Industry) and the northern lakefront suburb of Evanston.

The race was rescheduled for November 2, but had to be delayed again because hardly any entrants had arrived in Chicago.  Most entrants could not finish their autos in time, others could not get them transported.  One was damaged in route.  Then entrants arriving in the city in their cars were stopped by police.  City ordinances forbad self-propelled vehicles on the streets.  Drivers had to hitch their automobiles to teams of horses to enter the city. 

The race had to be delayed again as Time-Herald lawyers frantically lobbied the city to change the law.  Finally, with city approval obtained, the race was given a go-ahead for Thanksgiving.  

Three Benz Velos, considered the world's first production automobile, were entered in the race and were the heavy favorites.  One finished the course well behind Duryea.

Six vehicles made it to the starting line.  Three of them were manufactured in Germany by Karl Benz.  The German had patented his Motorwagen, the first vehicle powered by a gasoline fueled internal combustion engine in 1885 and by 1894 was producing his Velo model, considered the first mass produced automobile in the world.  It were Velos with 3 horsepower engines and a pivoting front axle controlled by a tiller that were entered in the race Two vehicles were electrically powered by storage batteries. 

 

The Pennington Victoria, one of two electric vehicles that quickly were out of the race when the cold weather drained their storage batteries.   Notice the jump seat saddle on the rear for a mechanic to attend the workings.  The failure of the cars in the race was a major set back for electric cars clearing the way for the further development of internal combustion autos.

The final entrant was a Duryea Motor Wagon built by brothers Frank and Charles Duryea, bicycle mechanics in Chicopee, Massachusetts with Frank at the helm.  The vehicle was just the second completed by the infant company.

Conditions the day of the race were not good.  Several inches of snow had fallen overnight and temperatures hovered just around freezing, giving drivers a challenge of fresh drifts in some spots, icy ruts on city streets, and slushy mud in the country. 

The race got underway at 8:05 a.m. with Duryea in the lead.  The electrical vehicles found their batteries drained by the freezing temperatures and were quickly out of the race.  One of the Benz autos hit a horse and was also out.  Duryea was in a comfortable lead when he skidded in the icy street and snapped off his tiller.  It took more than hour to locate a blacksmith and have him re-forge the end of the tiller and thread it to fit.  The remaining Benz vehicles passed him, but he regained the lead at the turn in Evanston.

On the way back, near Humboldt Park, one of the two cylinders in the Duryea engine stopped firing and Frank had to tinker for an hour.  Not realizing that the faster of the two remaining Benz autos was out of the race, Duryea struggled through heavy snow, but claimed never to have had to get out and push. 

Near the finish line he was held up by a frantic search for gasoline, which was sold only in small quantities at pharmacies for use as a cleaning product.  Then he was held up for more than five minutes by a freight train.  Duryea finally crossed the finish line at 7:18 p.m. having completed the route in seven hours and fifty-three minutes at an average speed of 7 miles per hour.   The remaining Benz crossed the finish line an hour and a half later.  No other vehicles completed the race.

The race succeeded in selling newspapers—but not enough to stave off the collapse of the final successor to the Times Herald before World War I.  The race generated national publicity and led to a surge in American auto innovation and production.  The quarreling Duryea brothers continued to manufacture Motor Wagons through the end of the century selling almost 300 of them.  After that each continued to produce cars separately.  Frank produced his with gun maker Stevens Arms for a few years.  Charles continued his production until 1917 by which time more modern machines had made his obsolete.