Karl Benz
Karl Benz built the first practical automobile and patented it in 1886. Born in Karlsruhe in 1844, he lost his father, a locomotive driver, to pneumonia when he was two, and his mother kept the family in poverty to educate him. He studied mechanical engineering at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic from fifteen. He worked for a series of firms, founded an iron foundry that failed, and had his tools seized for debt. His wife Bertha's dowry funded the next venture, and she remained the decisive figure in the story. He developed a reliable two-stroke and then four-stroke engine and, crucially, did not simply attach it to a horse carriage. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1885 was designed as an integrated vehicle: a light tubular steel frame, three wheels because he had not solved steering geometry for four, a single-cylinder four-stroke engine of about two-thirds of a horsepower, electric ignition, water cooling, a differential and a rack-and-pinion steering tiller. Patent number 37435 was granted on 29 January 1886. Nobody bought it. In August 1888 Bertha Benz took the vehicle without telling him and drove some hundred kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim with their two teenage sons, buying fuel from a pharmacy, clearing a blocked fuel line with a hatpin, insulating a wire with a garter, and having a blacksmith fit new brake linings — which she invented on the journey. The publicity created the market. Benz & Cie became the largest car maker in the world by 1900, and merged with Daimler in 1926. He died in 1929. Bertha's route is now a signposted heritage trail.
- Lived: 1844 CE – 1929 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: engineer, inventor, industrialist
