II. Reading. In 1885 German mechanical engineer, Karl Benz designed and built the world's first practical automobile to be powered by an internal-combustion engine.

 

In 1885 German mechanical engineer, Karl Benz designed and built the world's first practical automobile to be powered by an internal-combustion engine.

Karl Friedrich Benz was born in 1844 in Baden Muehlburg, Germany (now part of Karlsruhe). He was the son of an engine driver. Benz attended the Karlsruhe grammar school and later the Karlsruhe Polytechnic University. In 1871 he founded his first company with partner August Ritter, the Iron Foundry and Machine Shop, a supplier of building materials.

The enterprise's first year went very badly. Ritter turned out to be
unreliable. The business's tools were impounded. The difficulty was
overcome when Benz's fiancée, Bertha Ringer, bought out Ritter's share in the company using her dowry. In 1872 Karl Benz and Bertha Ringer
married, later having five children.

Despite such business misfortunes, Karl Benz led in the development of new engines in the early factory he and his wife owned. To get more revenues, in 1878 he began to work on new patents. First, he concentrated all his efforts on creating a reliable gas two-stroke engine. Benz finished his two-stroke engine on December 31, 1878, New Year's Eve, and was granted a patent for it in 1879.

Karl Benz showed his real genius, however, through his successive
inventions registered while designing what would become the production standard for his two-stroke engine. Benz soon patented the speed regulation system, the ignition using white power sparks with battery, the spark plug, the carburetor, the clutch, the gear shift, and the water radiator.

Problems arose again when the banks at Mannheim demanded that Bertha and Karl Benz's enterprise be incorporated due to the high production costs it maintained. The Benz's were forced to improvise an association with photographer Emil Bühler and his brother (a cheese merchant), in order to get additional bank support. The company became the joint-stock company Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim in 1882.

After all the necessary incorporation agreements, Benz was unhappy because he was left with merely five percent of the shares and a modest position as director. Worst of all, his ideas weren't considered when designing new products, so he withdrew from that corporation just one year later, in 1883.

Benz's lifelong hobby brought him to a bicycle repair shop in Mannheim owned by Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Esslinger. In 1883 the three founded a new company producing industrial machines: Benz&Cie. Quickly growing to twenty-five employees, it soon began to produce static gas engines as well.

The success of the company gave Benz the opportunity to indulge in his old passion of designing a horseless carriage. He used similar techno-logy when he created an automobile. It featured wire wheels (unlike
carriages' wooden ones) with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator. Power was transmitted by means of two roller chains to the rear axle. Karl Benz finished his creation in 1885 and named it the Benz Patent Motorwagen

It was the first automobile entirely designed as such to generate its own power. Benz began to sell the vehicle (advertising it as the Benz
Patent Motorwagen) in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history.

Early customers could only buy gasoline from pharmacies that sold small quantities as a cleaning product. The early-1888 version of the
Motorwagen had no gears and could not climb hills unaided. This limitation was rectified after Bertha Benz made her famous trip driving one of the vehicles a great distance and suggested to her husband the addition of another gear.

The great demand for stationary, static internal combustion engines forced Karl Benz to enlarge the factory in Mannheim, and in 1886 a new building was added. Benz & Cie. had grown in the interim from 50 employees in 1889 to 430 in 1899. During the last years of the nineteenth century, Benz was the largest automobile company in the world with
572 units produced in 1899.

In 1895 Benz designed the first truck in history, with some of the units later modified by the first motor bus company: the Netphener, becoming the first motor buses in history.

In 1896 Karl Benz was granted a patent for his design of the first flat engine. It had horizontally opposed pistons, a design in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead centre simultaneously, thus balancing each other with respect to momentum.

This design is still used by Porsche, Subaru, and some high perfor-mance engines used in racing cars.

1903 sales of Benz & Cie. reached 3,480 automobiles, and the company remained the leading manufacturer of automobiles. 1926 Benz & Cie.
and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) finally merged as the Daimler-Benz company and gave the model of the DMG automobiles the name Mercedes Benz. The name of that DMG model had been selected after ten-year-old Mercédès Jellinek, the daughter of Emil Jellinek who had set the specifications for the new model. Between 1900 and 1909 he was
a member of DMG’s board of management and long before the merger Jellinek had resigned.

Karl Benz was a member of the new Daimler Benz board of management for the remainder of his life. A new logo was created, consisting of
a three pointed star (representing Daimler’s motto: engines for land, air,
and water) surrounded by traditional laurels from the Benz logo, and the brand of all of its automobiles was labeled Mercedes Benz. Model names would follow the brand name in the same convention as today.

1929 Karl Benz died at home in Ladenburg at the age of eighty-four. The Benz home now has been designated as historic and is used as a scientific meeting facility for a nonprofit foundation, the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation, that honors both Bertha and Karl Benz for their roles in the history of automobiles.