Karl Benz

German inventor

• Born: November 25, 1844
• Birthplace: Karlsruhe, Baden (now in Germany)
• Died: April 4, 1929
• Place of death: Ladenburg, Germany

As one of the earliest inventors of a practical automobile, Benz made contributions of great importance to the modern way of life. He developed several features essential to automobile design and function.

Early Life

When Carl Benz was only two years old, his father, a railroad engineer, died of pneumonia. His widowed mother was left with only a small income for the support of her family. Benz was able to contribute to the family finances by profiting from his interest in technical matters. While still a child, he repaired clocks and watches for the neighbors and had his own darkroom. He used the darkroom to develop pictures he took for the visitors to the area of the Black Forest around Karlsruhe, where he lived.

At secondary school he remained interested in technical subjects and became an assistant to the physics instructor. After attending Karlsruhe Polytechnic, he gained valuable experience by working for a manufacturer of engines. Even at this time, he had in mind the construction of a horseless carriage and spent evenings drawing plans for it. In 1871, he went to Mannheim to work for a firm that made wagons, pumps, and cranes. Soon thereafter, in 1872, he opened his own shop to produce engines. He was apparently confident of success, as he was married to Berta Ringer, whom he had met on a job in Pforzheim, just before starting out on his own.

Benz’s confidence was not misplaced. His engines sold well, and he found investors who provided funds for him to establish the Mannheim Gas Engine Manufacturing Company. The new company employed forty people and was profitable. The venture lasted only a short time, however, as his shareholders were more interested in profits than in experimentation. They refused to allow him to use any of the profits for work on a horseless carriage, and he withdrew from the company, losing his investment after only three months of operations.

A man with Benz’s experience, ability, and money-making record could not fail to attract sympathetic investors for long, and on October 1, 1883, Benz and Company was founded. Two Mannheim businesspeople, Max Caspar Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Esslinger, were the investors in the new company for the production of “internal combustion engines after the plans of Carl Benz.” While his new partners were not enthusiastic about his experiments with horseless carriages, they were willing to tolerate them as long as he attended to the primary business of the company—the production of stationary gas engines. They were not to regret their indulgence.

Life’s Work

It is difficult to maintain that Benz was the first to invent the automobile because of the difficulty in establishing the definition of an automobile. Self-propelled, steam-driven vehicles had been in operation since the early nineteenth century. An Austrian, Siegfried Marcus, designed handcarts propelled by internal combustion engines during the 1860’s, and French experimenters constructed similar vehicles. In these circumstances it cannot be maintained that Benz was the first to produce an automobile, but his vehicles were the earliest practical, marketable horseless carriages.

The plans that Benz had been developing for nearly two decades quickly bore fruit once he had the necessary resources at his disposal. Probably the most important feature of the motorized tricycle he produced in 1885 was the engine. This is not surprising given his years of experience in designing and building engines. It was a four-cycle, or Otto-cycle, engine that burned gasoline.

The innovation that made the Benz engine particularly important was the ignition system. For the most part, previous engines had used a heated tube for ignition. This system left much to be desired. Benz used an electrical ignition system consisting of a four-volt battery connected to an induction coil wrapped around an iron core. In the circuit was a flat spring that was magnetically attracted to the iron core when current flowed through the coil. The attraction of the spring, known as a trembler, broke the circuit, allowing the spring to return to its original position and to reestablish the circuit.

The result was a rapid vibration of the trembler and the production of a series of charges to the spark plug, which sparked and ignited the gas in the combustion chamber. The spark had to be produced at the correct time. To achieve the correct timing, a rotor made of insulating material with a metal chip in its circumference was introduced into the circuit. The rotor was connected mechanically to the piston-driven shaft in such a way that the metal chip closed the circuit to the spark plug when the piston was at the top of the compression stroke. A switch allowed the circuit to be opened to stop the engine. This ignition system was the basis for all others from that time to the present.

Other features of his motorized tricycle included elliptical rear springs, rack-and-pinion steering, and water cooling. Belts and chains transmitted power from the engine to the solid rear axle. Benz later claimed that he had driven the tricycle in the spring of 1885, and many consider this to have been the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. In the autumn of 1885, he tested the vehicle before witnesses. The test was a short one. In fact, Benz never made it to the road outside his workshop yard: He ran into a brick wall, but he and his passenger—his wife—escaped injury. There were other tests as he developed his design, but his first public notice came on June 4, 1886, when the Neue Badische Landeszeitung printed a description of the vehicle, followed on July 3, 1886, by a favorable report of a test-drive.

Benz continued to improve his invention by adding a sun and planet gear that provided a second gear. He applied for a patent for this feature in April, 1887. Further improvements included a larger engine (three horsepower instead of one horsepower), better springs, and more effective brakes. By 1887, the vehicle had reached such a stage of development that it was possible to market it.

The first customer for a Benz automobile was a Frenchman named Émile Roger, who saw one demonstrated at the Paris Exhibition of 1887. In the following year, Benz won a gold medal at the Imperial Exhibition in Munich. The publicity from these exhibitions apparently stimulated a number of orders. In 1889, the Benz Company employed fifty workers. Business was so brisk that Benz was able to find new partners who financed a move to a larger factory where the company began producing vehicles with four wheels in 1890.

The addition of a fourth wheel was one of the few concessions Benz was to make to those who wanted him to maintain an up-to-date design. He appears to have regarded the design of 1890 as final and refused to make changes in it. Even when he consented to the addition of a hood to the front of the car, it was only an empty shell added for the sake of appearance. He insisted on keeping the engine at the rear. In 1905, he finally bowed to pressure from his colleagues and allowed sweeping design changes, but he and his wife continued to drive their older models.

Photographs of Benz posing as driver of his automobiles show a man of medium stature, dark hair, and constantly changing facial hair. He always wore a large mustache, but his goatees came and went presumably in accord with fashions of the day. Pictures of him in later life indicate that he became thinner and the hair and mustache turned white. The later photographs are of a man with a prominent, sharp nose and deep-set eyes.

Benz was not alone in the attempt to build a horseless carriage. His most significant German rival was Gottlieb Daimler . Many argue that Daimler should be regarded as the inventor of a practical, engine-driven vehicle with internal combustion. His engine was better in many respects, and his patent of August, 1885, predates Benz’s by five months. Benz’s adherents concede these points but note that Daimler’s work involved a motorcycle rather than a three- or four-wheeled vehicle. Competition between the two involved more than mere claims to priority. The two companies vied for sales, especially in France and Germany. It was for the sake of the French market that the Daimler product became known as the Mercedes. The French distributor suggested the name of his daughter, Mercedes, as sounding more French than Daimler and, therefore, more acceptable to the French buying public. Rivalry between Benz and Daimler was strictly on a commercial basis; they had never met when Daimler died in 1900.

During the economic depression that followed World War I in Germany, both the Daimler and Benz companies faltered. That led to their merger to form Mercedes-Benz in 1926. By that time Benz had little to do with the active management of the company that he had founded nearly forty years before.

Significance

The inventive genius of Carl Benz was considerable. Working independently, he managed to invent the necessary components for an automobile and combine them in a practical machine. The fact that Daimler and others produced better engines and made wider use of them in boats and for other applications does not detract from his accomplishments. Whether a motorized tricycle actually qualifies as the first automobile and whether it deserves such a title more than a motorcycle are less important concerns in assessing Benz’s career than his status as a pioneer in the marketing of automobiles. His contributions were certainly recognized as significant during his lifetime. Early examples of his cars were in museums, and two days before his death, on April 4, 1929, a procession of several hundred automobiles drove from Heidelberg to his house in Ladenburg, where dignitaries delivered a number of speeches acclaiming him as the inventor of the automobile.

As shown by the earlier inventions of Siegfried Marcus, it is one thing to produce a self-propelled vehicle but quite another to turn it into something that people will buy in significant numbers. It was to take the mass production techniques of Henry Ford and others to make the automobile into more than a plaything of the rich, but Benz and his rivals brought the idea of automobile ownership and its practicality into the minds of the buying public.

Bibliography

Auer, Greg. “Inventor of the Three-Wheeler Was Never Whiz Kid at Business.” Automotive News 75, no. 5908 (December 18, 2000): 20E. Tribute to Benz and his invention. Focuses on Benz’s wife, Bertha Ringer, who publicized her husband’s invention by taking the first automobile trip.

Kames, Beverly Rae. The Star and the Laurel: The Centennial History of Daimler, Mercedes, and Benz, 1886-1986. Montvale, N.J.: Mercedes-Benz of North America, 1986. The history of Daimler-Benz’s first hundred years, including information on Benz’s and Daimler’s inventions before and after they joined forces.

Karwatka, Dennis. “Technology’s Past.” Tech Directions 56, no. 6 (January, 1997): 10. Biography of Benz, credited as the inventor of the first car powered by an internal combustion engine. Includes information about Benz’s machine shop and the products he manufactured.

Nevins, Allan. Ford: The Times, the Man, and the Company. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954. Although devoted to Henry Ford, the first volume of this work contains considerable discussion of the development of the early automobile in general and of the contributions of Benz in particular. It also contains a useful bibliography for use in further research on the early development of the automobile.

Nixon, St. John C. The Invention of the Automobile. London: Country Life, 1936. This book is the story of Benz and Daimler and the creation of their company. Most of it is devoted to Benz, and it gives him the lion’s share of credit for the invention of the automobile, proclaiming him as its inventor. Contains helpful illustrations and photographs of several Daimler cars as well as a comparative chronology of Daimler’s and Benz’s lives.

Nye, Doug. Carl Benz and the Motor Car. London: Priory Press, 1973. Brief (96-page) discussion of Benz’s life and invention.

Poole, Lynn, and Gray Poole. Men Who Pioneered Inventions. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969. A book intended for juvenile readers. Gives considerable credit to Benz and boldly recognizes him as the inventor of the automobile.

Roberts, Peter. Veteran and Vintage Cars. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1963. One of the more readily available picture books dealing with early automobiles. Contains a descriptive text as well as color photographs and reproductions of advertisements. Covers the period to 1914 and has illustrations of the Benz products.

Singer, Charles, et al., eds. The Late Nineteenth Century, c. 1850 to c. 1900. Vol. 5 in A History of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. A useful book for more detailed explanations of the technical aspects of the work of Benz and the other early designers of internal combustion engines. The authors do not enter into the discussion of priority in the invention of the automobile.