Labels are for tins, not people

It’s funny, if not slightly sad, how we get so attached to labels in life. One such label that has always had a particular hold on me is that of ‘engineer.’ Back home, engineering and medical professionals are traditionally held in quite high esteem, so much so that people will often refer to us by title, rather than by name. I remember well the first time this happened to me: I was 20 years old and had just started an internship at the local Citroën factory when a much older and experienced colleague shouted across the assembly line to get my attention: ‘Miss Engineer! Miss Engineer!’ I looked around as if confirming he was really addressing me and I felt my knees buckle slightly – for the first time I could feel the heavy weight of expectation this title had laid upon my shoulders.

As someone with more than one degree in Engineering, you’d think I’d be comfortable with it by now, but I often still don’t feel worthy. You see, by definition an engineer is a creator, a designer of machines or structures, someone who works with their hands – who might even wear a hard hat. But yet, in my career, I cannot claim a single invention, concept or technological breakthrough that has come to life through my own personal merit. At least not yet.

At times like these I look to history for comfort. Certainly you will all recognise the name Carl Benz. Apart from co-founding one of the great car makers, his 1885 Benz Motorcar (or Patent-Motorwagen) is widely recognised to be the first internal combustion self-propelled automobile to go into series production – if you can call a couple of dozen cars in seven years ‘series production’.

It is less likely but still very possible you also know of his wife, Bertha. She is rightly famed for making the first known long-distance journey by car in the same machine – but very much without Carl’s knowledge. She left only a note on the kitchen table saying she’d taken their sons to see her mum and that they’d be gone a few days. She made no mention of how she was getting there, so we can only imagine Carl’s surprise when he discovered the Motorwagen was notable only for its absence.

But in a way that journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim – 50 miles or so – brave and important though it was, has overshadowed the much wider, more enduring role she played in the birth of the car. As far as I’m concerned, she deserves to be remembered for far more than merely ‘going out on a jolly’. For one thing, Bertha was very involved in Carl’s work from the beginning. Even before they married, she used her dowry to buy shares in his company to keep it afloat after a dispute with his business partner. She was also integrally involved with the practical side of making cars, helping out and overseeing as much of the technical process as she could. Staff saw her as the ‘foreman’, a title rarely associated with women at the time.

Bertha also often had far more faith in her husband’s creation than he. While Carl delayed the unveiling of his motor car, endlessly tinkering away in the hope of perfecting it, Bertha took matters into her own hands and snuck out one morning to prove that the car was already a perfectly viable form of transport – hence the trip to see her mum. Hitting the road meant Bertha conducted the very first official test drive, something she had also been championing for a while. All the challenges she encountered (and all the fixes she devised on the fly), like wooden brakes wearing out too quickly or the car struggling on hills, meant the next Benz automobile had leather lined brakes and a more useful lower gear and was, as a result, a much improved version of the original prototype.

She can also be credited with a very clever marketing stunt. Because however much talk there would have been had a man undertaken such a journey, the fact a woman had tamed the heavy deranged metal beast and done so safely really changed perceptions among the general public. Few things could have been more persuasive of the car’s potential for personal transportation.

But Bertha wasn’t an engineer. At the time, women weren’t welcome to study such subjects because it was believed our child-bearing ability would be harmed if our smaller, lighter brains were overwhelmed with too much information. And yet without her, the Benz Patent Motorwagen would likely never have made it into production and the entire history of the car would be different as a result.

So while she might not have been an engineer, Bertha Benz was a brilliant, stubborn, creative, driven and clearly fearless woman. She was the support team that propelled Carl’s breakthrough creation and once built, it was Bertha who both proved the concept: she was an investor, a marketeer, a project manager, a field tester and, above all, a believer.

So, next time I open up Excel or PowerPoint and crack my fingers before I start staring at yet another business case, I need to remember that maybe it really isn’t all about the labels we attach to ourselves. Because at the end of the day, engineering is a team sport made up of countless disciplines, and you only have to look at Bertha’s story to know it.