The Woman Behind The Wheel
Carl Benz May Have Designed The First Modern Automobile, But His Wife Drove It Into The History Books.
MANNHEIM, AUGUST 1888. Carl Benz just finished building his Patent-Motorwagen III, considered one of the world’s first automobiles. Satisfied by its advancement, he believed the next step would be welcoming customers coming en masse to buy this technological prowess. Carl Benz was a brilliant engineer but his business abilities were less convincing. Going this way was a one-way-ticket to bankruptcy.
This was without counting on the iron character of his wife, Bertha, a firm believer of her husband’s technical know-how and well conscious of the marketing help he would be needing. Instead of taking a train to visit her parents in Pforzheim, about a hundred kilometres away from Mannheim, she took the car, accompanied by her two elder sons.
Needless to say, the trip was epic: besides the inexistant road infrastructure, she had to find fuel in a pharmacy (the pharmacist later claimed to have been the world’s first gas station), to find her way in an environment without road signs, to re-tense transmission chains, to re-do the brake pads and to repair the engine using her jarretiere (garter).
One could have believed Carl Benz would have been overjoyed when learning about his wife’s courage and the accomplishment of the car. It wasn’t so. He was furious because of the risks taken, he forgot to congratulate her and asked to send the transmission chains back. Instead of sending the pieces back, Bertha drove the car back home, rendering the Patent-Motorwagen so famous that it was exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle soon after, leading to Benz’s financial success and to the further creation of Mercedes-Benz.
This story tells us about the importance of choosing humans around us. Being it our partners in life, in business or in an intricate way of both, faith in someone’s ability is constructive, even if it can upset our counterparts in the short run, the courage of abnegation sublimates acts: Bertha was not showing up for herself, she believed in her husband’s invention for the good of human mobility. She was ready to go to a lot of trouble for the purpose. In the end, she widely contributed to her family’s financial success.
A special thanks to Marc Lefrançois who tells Bertha Benz’s story with a lot of poetry and factuality in his book Histoires insolites des voitures de légende (City Editions, 2017)…and to Estelle for being my wife.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Monegasque™.
Disclosure: The Monegasque™ enhances the editing process with the help of carefully selected AI tools. These tools provide valuable support without taking over the editing process completely, ensuring that the final product is the result of human creativity and expertise augmented by the benefits of enhanced technology. This article is protected under the copyright of The Monegasque™. Unauthorized reprinting, republishing, or rewriting of this content is strictly prohibited without explicit permission from The Monegasque™. Quotations from this material are permissible provided that a direct link to the full article on The Monegasque™ is included.