Project Petrolhead

1886 was a weird old year. The Statue of Liberty was erected, Coca-Cola was invented, and Karl Benz put the finishing touches on the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the world’s first internal-combustion-engined car. The Motorwagen was a precarious little so-and-so, essentially consisting of a wooden park bench attached to three spindly bicycle wheels, steered by an agricultural tiller and powered by a puttering 954cc single-cylinder engine churning out a record-breaking (technically true) two-thirds of a horsepower. Even though the thing was clearly an absolute deathtrap, it didn’t take long for the world’s first car, to be the victim of the world’s first car thief.

First, some background. Karl Benz was born in 1844 (making him almost as old as your mum) in Mühlburg, Germany. Inspired from a young age by his stepfather, Benz grew up with a love of trains, going on to study mechanical engineering at Karlsruhe polytechnical school  at the age of just 15, and becoming a draftsman for several engineering firms. At the age of 25, however, he would meet a young woman named Bertha Ringer.

In August 1888, Bertha (now Bertha Benz, wife of Karl and mother to their five children) decided to go and see her mother. There was only one small problem, her mother lived 65 miles away in Pforzheim, and the journey by carriage would take somewhere in the ballpark of 3-5 business weeks. There had to be another way. And then Bertha remembered that her husband had been working on his funny little motor-tricycle in his spare time, perfecting the design with such mod-cons as leather seats and… Well, mostly that, actually. Karl had not thought the Motorwagen to be a financially viable project and had essentially given up development, despite the fact that he’d never made any effort to market the thing to anyone outside his immediate family, and that gave Bertha an idea.

On the morning of the 5^th of August, Bertha and two of her children; Richard and Eugen, set off in the Motorwagen… Without telling Karl that they’d taken his car. Traffic Cops wasn’t on the telly back then (mostly because TV hadn’t been invented yet, and Jamie Theakston hadn’t been born) but I’m sure they would have labelled Bertha as the world’s first TWOC-er. A 65-mile journey sounds straightforward to modern ears, but in 1888? Not so much. For starters, no cars meant no motoring infrastructure. That meant no tarmacked roads, no traffic control, and no petrol stations. No matter, just fill up before you go! Except the Motorwagen could only hold 4.5 litres of fuel, meaning they’d have run out after a quarter of the journey. How did Bertha get around this? When the car ran low, she decided to stop in a town called Wiesloch and pop to a pharmacy, purchasing as much Ligroin as possible. Ligroin is an industrial-strength solvent, essentially a white spirit, that had a high enough petroleum content to keep the Motorwagen puttering along for those 65 gruelling miles.

Shockingly, the rest of the journey wasn’t plain sailing either. One of the fuel pipes clogged, which she cleared out with a hat pin; The wooden brakes failed, solved by employing a local cobbler to nail some shoe leather onto the brake (inadvertently creating the world’s first brake shoes); And the Motorwagen’s cooling system, only designed for short trips, was evaporative, so every time they filled up with fuel, the trio had to brim the radiator with water. Add that to the fact they were basically travelling down donkey paths and it’s a wonder that Bertha and the boys made it to their destination alive and in one piece.

A few days later, they made the return journey and were shocked to find that Bertha’s cannonball run had garnered a huge amount of publicity and, shortly thereafter, orders for the Motorwagen began to roll in.

It’s fair to say that without Bertha Benz, Karl might have continued to procrastinate with the Motorwagen, and the car may never have taken off at all, let alone become the dominant form of individual transport on the planet, so it’s fitting that Germany holds a biennial parade of vintage vehicles along the Bertha Benz Memorial Route. I wonder if he invented car keys for the next one?

(He didn’t, the first car key wasn’t produced until 1908, and the first ignition key didn’t appear until 1910, and the first key-operated-starter wasn’t until 1949.)