136 Years Ago, Bertha Benz Did More than Just Take a Drive

August fifth, 2024 marks the 136th anniversary of Bertha Benz’s history-making 66-mile drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim in her husband Karl’s Patent-Motorwagen. Supposedly unbeknownst to Karl, she had their two teenage sons help her push the three-wheeler out of his workshop, and off they went. I’m a little skeptical that it was done on the sly, as the Motorwagen is not nearly as quiet as a Tesla, as you can hear in this video of an authentic reproduction owned the Automotive Hall of Fame on display at Greenfield Village’s 2019 Old Car Festival.

It wasn’t the first public drive of the Motorwagen, though, as Karl had driven it a bit more than a month earlier on Mannheim’s Ringstrasse. He was having trouble selling his motorcar, though, and Bertha took it upon herself to publicize his invention by literally taking it to the streets and demonstrating its practicality with the first recorded automotive road trip. Well, maybe not streets, as the quality of routes between towns back then varied dramatically. She made their way by asking directions from some of the hundreds of people who saw the Patent-Motorwagen puttering along at the amazing pace of 10 to 14 miles per hour.

The Motorwagen’s 954-cc, two-horsepower single-cylinder, four-stroke engine was water cooled by a complete-loss system without a radiator, so she regularly had to stop by streams and horse troughs to refill the water tank. The legend says that she also used a hairpin to clear out a clogged fuel line and some fabric from her garter to insulate a short-circuited spark plug wire. While the vehicle was relatively fuel-efficient, getting about 25 miles to the gallon, the fuel tank only held 1.3 gallons. If good roads were years into the future, gasoline refineries and fuel stations were decades yet to come, so Bertha stopped at the Stadtapotheke, the apothecary in Wiesloch, about half way, where she was able to purchase some ligroin, a petroleum naptha used as a solvent and dry-cleaning fluid.

Three days later, Bertha and the boys returned to Mannheim, taking a slightly different route, perhaps to expose the Motorwagen to more people. As it was, her drive to Pforzheim had been covered by local press so she was already a bit of a local celebrity. After she returned to Mannheim, the national press in Germany picked up the story, generating sales, allowing Benz & Co. to get established as a going concern.

The rest, as they say, is history.

That’s the well-known story. What’s not as well-known is just how important Bertha Benz was to Benz & Co. and creation of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. One could accurately say that if it wasn’t for her, Mercedes-Benz would not exist today.

Cäcilie Bertha Ringer was born May 3, 1849 in Pforzheim, Germany to a family of means. In school, the sciences were her favorite subjects, and machinery fascinated her. Against her father’s wishes she became engaged to a young mechanical engineer, Karl Benz, who had dreams of making a motorized vehicle, but had little in the way of resources to achieve those dreams. Like Hazel Chapman did with Lotus, two years before their marriage, in 1870, Bertha Ringer used her dowry to fund the newly formed Benz & Co., a venture intended to manufacture industrial machinery and stationary engines. Eventually Karl started making petrol engines, allowing him to pursue the development of a motorcar.

Bertha was not just an investor. Not only did she oversee and manage the business side of Benz & Co., she was also a valuable technical partner to her husband, suggesting improvements to the fuel line design and coming up with the idea of using leather brake pads instead of just bare wood.

It would take Karl almost 15 years to produce his first working prototype and then a second and third iteration, which would become known as “Patent-Motorwagen Nr. 3,” the vehicle that Bertha drove on that historic day.

Why did Bertha Benz drive to Pforzheim, you might ask? Well, she went to visit her mother.