Under the Seat There was no hood in the world's first car Instead Karl had placed the engine under the seat of the open air vehicle In fact his motorwagen looked less like a modern car and more like an elaborate tricycle with two wheels in back and a smaller one in front But although it borrowed from the design of bicycles it also added the breakthrough technology of an internal combustion engine with three quarters of one horsepower The car had a water cooled radiator to keep the engine from overheating and multiple gears to increase speed and power Nonetheless there was room for improvement HOW MUCH IS A HORSEPOWER An engine's power is commonly measured in a unit called horsepower James Watt a Scottish engineer developed this measurement in the late 1700s after doing experiments with horses to see how much they could lift One horsepower equals the power required to lift 33 000 pounds 15 000 kg one foot 0 3 m in one minute Although the measurement is tied to horses its power is actually substantially more than a typical horse could sustain over the course of a day Karl Benz s first engine had three fourths of one horsepower Today s car engines routinely have more than 200 horsepower When Bertha returned home to Mannheim she had several suggestions for Karl They included putting linings on the brakes to improve their performance and adding another gear for chugging up hills since the original model required a little pushing from behind Benz s motorwagen looked very different from modern cars 11
Karl tinkered with his car and by 1889 he had come up with another model the third version It incorporated Bertha's recommendations and also featured the choice between a folding roof or extra seating The new model was a hit when the Benzes showed it at the World's Fair in Paris France in 1889 and its popularity began to spread The love affair with the automobile had begun Gottlieb Daimler By 1900 Benz was producing approximately 600 automobiles in a year and soon other early inventors would push the car s development even further Gottlieb Daimler was another German inventor who lived near Benz He had no particular love for driving or cars Instead his passion was engines whatever machine they went on In 1885 just as Benz was perfecting his motorwagen Daimler was building his own engine 60 miles 97 km away with his partner Wilhelm Maybach The two envisioned a smaller more powerful engine For one thing it needed to start faster thus producing more power For that to happen it needed a different ignition system An ignition system lights the fuel to power the engine Daimler and Maybach experimented with different engine designs eventually developing one they dubbed the grandfather clock because that s what it looked like Daimler installed his engine on a bicycle resulting in the first motorcycle He later put it on a stagecoach and a boat Daimler's engines were superior to Benz's although it was Benz who had first married the engine to the overall Daimler combined an engine with a bicycle to create the first motorcycle 12
