by Ross Finlay (03 Aug 03)

There are several adventurous drivers at Hockenheim this weekend for the German Grand Prix, but not one of them is half as adventurous as Bertha Benz, wife of Karl who built the first petrol-engined car.

Benz Patent Motor Car Model 1 was granted the famous patent number 37435, for a "vehicle with gas propulsion", on January 29, 1886. Karl took it for its first test run in July of that year, and followed it, naturally enough, with Model 2 and Model 3.

The test runs he did with these three-wheeled vehicles were never farther than a town called Weinheim, about 20 kilometres from Mannheim. As his successors at Mercedes-Benz have been recalling: "The public responded to the rattling carriage with mixed feelings, ranging from horror to amazement. Envious contemporaries even attempted to bring charges against him, there were numerous travel restrictions and even Benz himself did not have complete faith in his own invention."

However, his splendid wife Bertha (pictured here in 1888 and above as a young woman) - "fearless and courageous", as her husband said - did have complete faith in both Karl and his invention, handing over her dowry when his original business was on the point of failure, and in 1888 cajoling him into entering Model 3 for a major engineering exhibition.

Karl still hadn't done any proper long-distance trials, contenting himself with those runs from Mannheim to Weinheim, partly because he wasn't convinced that even Model 3 would survive a tougher journey and show the world that motoring really was a practical proposition.

Off On Their Hols

So Bertha decided to do it for him. One morning in August 1888, at the start of the school holidays, she and their two sons - 14 year-old Richard and 15 year-old Eugen - sneaked quietly out of the house, Bertha having left a note for Karl, who was still asleep, that she and the boys were off to see her mother in Pforzheim. The implication was that they'd gone off for an early-morning train. At any rate, she didn't actually say, "Darling, I've taken the car." 
 
Her husband would hardly have credited such an action, because Bertha didn't know how to start the car, didn't know how to drive it and, as things turned out, had a rather hazy idea about the direct route to Pforzheim.

The three conspirators opened up the workshop, pushed the car outside, and continued pushing until they were out of earshot of the house. Then they fired it up by turning the horizontal flywheel, and started off on the world's first long-distance petrol-car drive. None of them had previously taken to the road without Karl, but the boys had a fair notion of what it was all about.

Having no clear idea of the direct route to Pforzheim, Bertha headed on familiar roads to Weinheim where, instead of turning back to Mannheim as Karl had done so often, they picked up signposts and with Eugen at the controls turned south to Wiesloch, Langenbrunnen and Bruchsal, having to buy supplies of ligroin (which, as we've noted before, was the name at that time for what we now call petrol).

Of course, in 1888 there were no roadside filling stations as we know them today, and Bertha made several stops at chemists' shops, at that time the only suppliers of ligroin, to fill up the 4.5-litre container which fed the carburetter. Content with his own short test trips, Karl hadn't yet thought of the fuel tank.

As it happens, not only can Bertha's original route be followed almost exactly today, but the pharmacy in Wiesloch is still in business, describing itself with commendable pride as "the world's first filling station".

It wasn't just fuel the car needed, of course. With no closed cooling system, the water evaporated pretty quickly. The crew stopped regularly to fill up with water from guest houses, wayside wells and, when all else failed, just ditches. Water consumption was later reckoned to be something like 150 litres per 100 kilometres.

Keeping Karl In Touch

At Bruchsal, Bertha and the boys thought they'd better let Dad know that they hadn't told him the whole story of their visit to Grandma, and sent him a telegram explaining why the car had disappeared too.

They continued through Durlach, then into the hills by Wilferdingen and Brötzingen. With only 2.5hp and two ill-suited gear ratios, the gradients were a problem. Sometimes the crew got down to push, and once Bertha had to pay a couple of farm hands to add extra muscle. Going downhill, with feeble block brakes acting on the rear wheels via a lever on the steering crank, had its hairy moments too.

On such a trail-blazing journey, mechanical troubles were bound to occur. Nothing fazed Bertha, though. For example, when the carburettor clogged up, she simply removed her hat pin and de-clogged it.

Another minor problem was that the Model 3 had no lights. Bertha and the boys arrived at Pforzheim in the dusk, and decided to put up at a hotel before continuing to her mother's house. At the hotel, another telegram was sent off to Karl, saying that they'd arrived safely. 
 
On the return leg a few days later, bringing home newspapers with reports of their outward journey to show Karl, Bertha took a shorter route to complete the round trip of 180 kilometres or so.

Yes, she went via Hockenheim where, on the weekend we publish this feature, the McLaren-Mercedes Formula 1 cars - which can trace their heritage all the way back to the Benz Patent Motor Car Model 3 - are competing in the German Grand Prix 115 years later, almost to the day.

They won't upstage Bertha, that indomitable lady who got the motoring show on the road.

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