CHAPTER 1 ROAD TRIP ne evening in 1878 Karl Benz and his wife Bertha decided to try out the engine Karl had been building He'd had varying degrees of success Sometimes the engine worked Much of the time it didn't This would be one of the good times Karl recalled later My heart was pounding I turned the crank The engine started to go put put put and the music of the future sounded with regular rhythm We both listened to it run for a full hour Over the next few years the German inventor perfected his engine and built a body to go around it While there had been other attempts at motorized vehicles over the years they were really the
Dr Inventor Karl Benz left and his assistant Josef Brecht drive around in the 1885 E Benz
world's earliest hybrids a traditional horse buggy with a motor attached But Kar's was the first true automobile a vehicle that integrated the body and the engine into one comprehensive whole But few people in the late 1800s wanted to buy Karl's new invention His motorized carriage was revolutionary but it was also strange No one actually needed an automobile because they already had horses Not WHAT SHOULD YOU CALL IT When the horseless carriage first arrived people struggled to find a good name for it The word automobile was derived from the French taken from auto for self and mobile for movement Car was a shortened version of carriage Some early inventors called their vehicles motor wagons while American pioneer Henry Ford settled on quadricycle for his first four wheeled creation Later names for styles of cars such as the two door coupe and the four door sedan were also borrowed from types of buggies many could afford such a thing even if they wanted it Karl's motorwagen as he called it received a patent in 1886 Karl would eventually be considered one of the primary inventors of the modern car However in 1886 the future of the automobile looked bleak Karl might have given up but Bertha had other ideas Bertha Steals a Car Bertha who married Karl in 1872 had long been the driving force behind her husband It was his mechanical and technical knowledge that led to him patenting critical car parts including a clutch water radiator carburetor and spark 8
plugs But it was her indomitable spirit and knack for promotion that ultimately got the automobile in motion One summer morning in 1888 Bertha loaded up her two teenage sons in Karl s German police arrested Karl Benz in 1882 for driving a prototype of his automobile in the street motorwagen without telling her husband The three took the world s first road trip driving from Mannheim to Pforzheim Germany to visit Bertha s mother That was the reason Bertha gave for the trip anyway although her real motive was probably to promote Karl's automobile Heads turned as they drove by at the dizzying speed of eight miles per hour 13 kmh It took them all day to make the 66 mile 106 km journey and it was not an easy ride Bertha had to stop several times to fix small problems in the car and to buy fuel which was only sold at pharmacies as a household cleaner By sunset though they reached their destination Bertha made one last stop to send a telegram to Karl letting him know they had arrived
