Karl Benz(1844 — 1929)

On August 5, 1888, without telling her husband, Bertha Benz took the Motorwagen with their two sons and drove nearly 106 kilometers from Mannheim to Pforzheim — the first long-distance automobile journey in history. Along the way, she unclogged a fuel line herself with a hairpin and convinced a cobbler to re-line the leather brake pads: a demonstration that the car was viable, and tremendous publicity for her husband's invention.

Patent no. 37435, filed on January 29, 1886 at the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin, is today considered the birth certificate of the automobile. Karl Benz had worked for years without a stable income, taking on heavy debts, before this official document enshrined his invention. His wife Bertha had even pawned her family jewels to fund the experiments.

For months, Karl Benz tested his motorized tricycle at night in the courtyard of his Mannheim workshop, so as not to frighten passers-by or alert the competition. The noise of the internal combustion engine was so unfamiliar that neighbors believed it was some kind of infernal machine. The local police eventually banned him from driving in the city, forcing him to test his vehicle on isolated roads.

Contrary to what one might assume, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler — the two pioneers of the German automobile — never met during their lifetimes, even though they were working in parallel less than 100 kilometers apart. It was only in 1926, three years before Benz's death, that their companies merged to form Mercedes-Benz — one of industrial history's great ironies.

In 1893, the Benz Velo became the world's first mass-produced automobile: 1,200 units built over several years at a price relatively accessible to the middle class. It was this model that transformed the automobile from a laboratory curiosity into a real commercial product, laying the foundations of the global automotive industry.