The Birth of the Automobile

On 29 January 1886, Carl Benz filed patent DRP 37435 for a vehicle powered by a gas engine. Its single-cylinder, three-wheeled form — the Benz Patent-Motorwagen — was the first machine conceived from the ground up to move under its own power. The age of the automobile began here.

The machine was modest: a single-cylinder four-stroke engine of not quite one litre, giving three-quarters of one horsepower, cooled by water and lit by an electric spark of Benz's own design. It reached sixteen kilometres an hour. Yet nothing before it had been conceived this way — not a carriage with an engine added, but a vehicle imagined, from its first line, around the engine at its heart.

Two years later, without her husband’s knowledge, Bertha Benz drove one hundred and six kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her two sons — the first long journey by automobile. She cleaned a fuel line with her hatpin and asked a cobbler to line the brakes with leather. Her drive proved the machine to a doubting world, and every improvement it demanded was built into the cars that followed.