Bertha Benz's Historic Drive (1888)
On the morning of August 5, 1888, Bertha Benz set out from Mannheim, Germany, with her two teenage sons in a three-wheeled Benz Patent-Motorwagen, telling her husband Carl only that she was visiting her mother. Her 105-kilometer round trip to Pforzheim became the world's first long-distance automobile journey, transforming a fragile workshop prototype into a proven, marketable machine.
A Secret Departure
By the summer of 1888, Carl Benz had patented his three-wheeled Motorwagen two years earlier, but sales were nonexistent and Carl himself had grown discouraged, wary of further public demonstrations after earlier tests had drawn skepticism and even ridicule. Bertha Benz, who had used her own dowry to help finance her husband's engineering work, believed fiercely in the vehicle's potential and decided that only a dramatic, real-world demonstration would convince the public and potential buyers. Without telling Carl her true destination, she woke her sons, Richard, 15, and Eugen, 13, before dawn and pushed the Motorwagen out of the workshop so as not to wake her husband. She left him a note explaining she was taking the boys to visit her mother in Pforzheim, roughly 60 kilometers away. In reality, she intended to drive the entire distance in the automobile itself, an audacious plan given that no one had ever attempted such a long trip in a motor vehicle. The car had a top speed of about 16 kilometers per hour and carried only enough fuel, a solvent called ligroin, for short local trips, meaning Bertha would need to improvise fuel stops along unpaved country roads never designed for automobiles.
Did You Know?
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