Bertha Benz
1849 – 1944 · Germany
Known for: Automotive pioneer who made the first long distance drive and proved the motor car worked
“She took the first long road, and the world followed it.”
Biography
Bertha Benz was born Cäcilie Bertha Ringer in Pforzheim on 3 May 1849, the third of nine children in a prosperous carpenter's family in the Grand Duchy of Baden. She spent ten years at a boarding school in the town, remembered for her ambition and her fascination with machines. University was closed to women in Baden, so the technical education she wanted had to be gathered by other means. In 1869 she met Carl Benz, five years her senior, penniless and consumed by engines. In 1870, still unmarried and therefore still legally able to act on her own account, she put part of her dowry into his failing iron construction workshop, a step German law would have forbidden her once she became his wife.
They married in 1872, and her money and her nerve carried the workshop through years in which the bailiff once emptied it entirely. On New Year's Eve 1879 their two stroke engine ran for the first time, and in December 1885 the first Patent Motorwagen was finished. Carl Benz applied for the patent alone, since the law gave his wife no standing, and he proved a poor salesman against Gottlieb Daimler. On 5 August 1888 Bertha Benz settled the matter herself. Without telling her husband and without permission from the authorities, she set out from Mannheim at dawn with her sons Eugen and Richard, fifteen and thirteen, and drove the Model III some 106 kilometres to Pforzheim. She cleared a blocked fuel line with her hat pin, insulated a wire with her garter, had a blacksmith mend a chain, and bought ligroin at the city pharmacy in Wiesloch, which thereby became the first filling station in the world. When the wooden brakes began to fail she had a cobbler nail leather to them, and so invented the brake lining.
She reached Pforzheim after dusk and telegraphed her husband, then drove home a few days later. The journey brought exactly the publicity she had wanted, and the Patent Motorwagen its first buyers. Her notes from the road led to an additional low gear for hills and to brake linings on later machines. Benz & Cie. grew into the largest car maker in the world, and in 1906 the family moved to Ladenburg, where Carl, Bertha and their sons founded the firm Benz Söhne. Bertha Benz died in Ladenburg on 5 May 1944, two days after her ninety fifth birthday. Her share in the invention of the motor car was overlooked for the better part of a century; today the road she took in 1888 is signposted as the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.