The Real Influencers: Karl Benz

Benz & Companie Rheinsiche Gasmotoren-Fabrik – shortened to Benz & Cie – was incorporated in 1883. It bought a bicycle repair business, and, using bicycle know-how and Benz’s own engine technology, work began on what would become the first commercially available car.

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen looked more like a cart than what we’d today call a car, although unlike rival Gottlieb Daimler’s contemporary horseless carriage – which we shall meet later – it did have a purpose-built chassis. It differed too in having a single organic unit of engine and chassis, not a motorised version of an existing vehicle. There was no bodywork, no windscreen, no windows and no roof. It used steel tubing and wood panels. Bertha sat perched high on a leather-covered bench seat on her historic journey, exposed and unprotected, driving at up to 12mph in her full-length long-sleeve crinoline dress and bodice, wearing a hat and scarf to protect her hair.

Unlike most subsequent cars, it had just three wheels. Both rear wheels were driven, and the single front wheel steered by tiller. Steering by two front wheels was, at this stage, too difficult a technical challenge for Benz to master. The engine was a single cylinder 954cc four-stroke, designed and built by Benz, which ran on benzene and produced about 0.7hp at 400rpm. Modern features included water cooling, electric ignition, mechanically operated valves and a differential. By the time car number three had been built, power had more than doubled to a heady 1.5hp.

There was no front suspension and the tyres, designed by Benz himself, were of solid rubber. (A year before Bertha’s journey, John Boyd Dunlop had developed the first practical pneumatic tyre for his son’s tricycle, but Benz would likely have known little about that.)

It was an astonishing technical achievement, the work largely of a single man. As there was no precedent, Benz had to work out how to adapt a stationary gas-fuelled four-stroke engine for mobile use: how to mount it, fuel it, cool it, and how it would power one or more wheel. And how to ensure the engine kept running when the vehicle stopped? How to make the horseless carriage accelerate and slow? And crucially, what sort of chassis to fit it to?

In 1888, the same year that Bertha drove to see her mum, Benz sold his first Motorwagen, to Parisian Émile Roger, who became his French agent. Following a high-profile showing at the 1889 Paris World Fair, for which the Eiffel Tower was built, demand boomed – especially in France. Benz employed 50 people to build his new vehicle in his small Mannheim factory. Petrol car production had begun.

Numerous self-propelled ‘automobiles’ had been built well before the birth of Benz’s car. The early ones were steam-powered, for steam was revolutionising industry and was on the cusp of doing the same for transport. The first full-size vehicle to run under its own power was probably a steam tractor, built in 1770 by French military engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. He built two prototypes, one of which ran well enough in 1771 to hit a stone wall. It was the first known automobile accident.

Within a few decades, steam-powered road carriages would appear on British, American and French roads. They successfully transported people at about the same time that the railways accepted their first passengers, well before Karl Benz was born.

Steam-powered vehicles, including lightweight personal ‘steamers’, would continue to evolve. Peugeot’s first car of 1889 was powered by steam: four were produced. As the 20^th century dawned, and just over a decade after Benz sold his first vehicle, steam cars outsold petrol cars in America by almost two to one.

Yet the oil-powered internal combustion engine had so many advantages over steam its supremacy would soon become apparent. It was much lighter, far more compact and more thermally efficient. Plus, petrol did not freeze in the depths of a North American or Northern European winter.

No single person invented the petrol engine, any more than Benz invented the automobile. The Belgian Étienne Lenoir sold the first commercially successful internal combustion engine – a stationary two-stroke – in 1860. In 1863, his ICE-powered Hippomobile – ‘horse carriage’ – drove from Paris to Joinville and back, a round trip of about 14 miles.

In 1862, French engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas patented the principle of the four-stroke engine, as later used by Benz and subsequently by virtually every other maker of cars over the next 160 years (and still universally used by petrol-powered cars today). Alas for poor de Rochas, he never built a working prototype.

More than a decade later, German engineer Nicolaus August Otto did. He also commercialised it. That’s why, today, the four-stroke engine that revolutionised road transport, and was a crucial feature of Benz’s first car, is called the Otto cycle engine. More than 30,000 Otto engines were built as stationary power units from the mid-1870s to the 1880s. The horseless carriage needed a light, efficient and powerful self-contained engine. The Otto cycle motor was it.

Nicolaus Otto’s new NA Otto & Cie firm was quickly renamed Deutz and, by the 1870s, was the world’s largest producer of stationary engines. Yet Otto refused to experiment with engines for horseless carriages and other light transport. This frustrated his factory manager, Gottlieb Daimler. Relations got so strained that in 1880 Daimler was sacked. With his redundancy money, he set up his own business in Cannstatt, just outside Stuttgart, taking Otto’s technical director Wilhelm Maybach with him.

Daimler’s engines got lighter and revved faster than any internal combustion motors before and were the smallest and best four-stroke engines of their day. He fitted one to a bicycle in 1885, which duly set his son’s trousers on fire. It was the world’s first internal combustion engine motorcycle.

Today, of course, Daimler and Benz are as closely associated as Rolls and Royce. Yet they remained bitter rivals back in the late 19^th century. Their factories were 60 miles apart, and the men never met. The closest professional association they had was when Daimler sued Benz in 1896 for violating a patent. Daimler won.

Benz production boomed when he introduced four-wheel production cars. His first was the Viktoria of 1893, followed by the technically similar Velo. It was the world’s first proper production car, built in volume to a standardised design: over 1200 were made from 1894 to 1902. By the turn of the century, Benz was the world’s largest car maker.

Benz’s company would enjoy subsequent success in motor racing and pioneered early diesel engines. Yet it struggled commercially after the success of the Velo. Like that other car industry giant Henry Ford 20 or so years later, Karl Benz was loath to change a successful formula. Just as Ford hung on to his Model T for far too long, allowing competitors to overtake, so Karl Benz stubbornly refused to follow modern design trends, sticking to his outdated designs. He stuck to his rear engines and belt drive when keener rivals had seen the advantages of Panhard’s new system: its front-engined/rear-drive configuration, connected by a driveshaft, would be the industry standard for the next 60 years.

By contrast Daimler was more than happy to move with the times and his cars became more advanced than Benz’s. This is partly because he had a talented team of engineers, notably Willy Maybach; Benz was more the loner. Well into the 20^th century, he and Bertha were still seen driving through the streets of Mannheim in one of his old and outdated cars.

Daimler died in 1900. Karl Benz stopped working actively for his company in 1903, instead sitting on its supervisory board, but it wasn’t until 1926 that the two oldest automobile companies in the world merged to form Daimler-Benz. Karl Benz stayed on the management board until he died, aged 84, in 1929. Bertha lived on to 1944, dying aged 95.

And what of that other famous name so closely associated with Daimler and Benz – Mercedes? For what is probably the best-known car brand name in the world we must thank the general consul for the Austro-Hungary empire in Nice at the turn of the 20^th century.

Emil Jellinek was a wealthy and well-connected businessman as well as a diplomat, and the son of a distinguished Hungarian-born rabbi. His businesses included insurance, stockbroking and, more recently and most profitably, selling new-fangled automobiles. He became particularly fond of the work of Wilhelm Maybach, the chief engineer at Daimler who, a century later, would lend his name to a brace of uncomely luxury cars, marketed by Mercedes-Benz, which failed abysmally to offer Rolls-Royce much competition.

Jellinek commissioned a special sporting car from Daimler, designed by Maybach. He laid down strict specifications, not least a low centre of gravity, and called it the Mercedes after his 10-year-old eldest daughter.

That 1901 Mercedes 35hp previewed a host of new technologies, from the gate-change gearlever, to the honeycomb radiator, to a steel rather than wooden chassis. Jellinek became a member of the Daimler management board and changed his surname to Jellinek-Mercedes, joking that, ‘this is the probably first time a father has taken his daughter’s name’. More significantly, the Mercedes name became respected worldwide, and from 1926 became the recognised brand for the newly merged Daimler-Benz company. It became the favoured car of princes, politicians and plutocrats, as well as dictators, and remains so to this day.

Among its notable advocates was Adolf Hitler, who famously bankrolled Mercedes-Benz’s Grand Prix programme and frequently paraded from the back seats of Mercedes cars throughout the 1930s. He saw it as the most German of all cars. How would he have reacted if told that it was, in fact, named after a rabbi’s granddaughter?