Bertha Benz

Born Cäcilie Bertha Ringer on 3 May 1849 in Pforzheim, Bertha came from a wealthy family home. Always a technophile, she decided against a "good match" with a financially secure future and for the young, unemployed but visionary engineer Carl Benz. She had her dowry paid in advance and put it into his small business.

Carl finished work on his first horseless carriage in December 1885. Bertha served as a field tester, contributing to the design of the Motorwagen by adding wire insulation and inventing leather brake pads to supplement the wooden brakes when they failed. Moreover, she identified several key areas of opportunities – such as the fuel line design – that Carl later improved. In addition to her contributions to the machine’s design, Bertha helped finance the development of the Motorwagen. She would hold patent rights under modern law, but as a married woman, she was not allowed to be named as an inventor on the patent at that time.[

Together they had five children: Eugen (1873–1958), Richard (1874–1955), Clara (1876–1968), Thilde (1882–1974), and Ellen (1890–1973). For many years, the ever-growing family had to live partly on the breadline, as Benz remained unlucky as an entrepreneur. With iron austerity Bertha ran the household; every penny was invested in Benz´work. Without them he would have been lost, as he later admits in his memoirs: "Only one person stood by me in the little ship of life in those days when it was going to ruin. That was my wife. Bravely and courageously she hoisted new sails of hope."

On 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance. Before this historic trip, motorized drives were merely very short trials, returning to the point of origin, made with assistance of mechanics. Following wagon tracks, this pioneering tour covered a one-way distance of about 106 km (66 mi). Although the ostensible purpose of the trip was to visit her mother, Bertha Benz had other motives — to prove to her husband, who had failed to adequately consider marketing his invention, that the automobile in which they both had heavily invested would become a financial success once it was shown to be useful to the general public; and to give her husband the confidence that his constructions had a future. She left Mannheim around dawn, solving numerous problems along the way. Bertha demonstrated her significant technical capabilities on this journey. With no fuel tank and only a 4.5-litre supply of petrol in the carburetor, she had to find ligroin, the petroleum solvent needed for the car to run. The solvent was only available at apothecary shops, so she stopped in Wiesloch at the city pharmacy to purchase the fuel. At the time, petrol and other fuels could only be bought from pharmacists, and so this is how the chemist in Wiesloch became the first fuel station in the world. She cleaned a blocked fuel line with her hat pin and used her garter as insulation material.A blacksmith had to help mend a chain at one point. When the wooden brakes began to fail, Benz visited a cobbler to install leather, making the world's first pair of brake linings. An evaporative cooling system was employed to cool the engine, making water supply a big worry along the trip. The trio added water to their supply every time they stopped. The car's two gears were not enough to surmount uphill inclines and Eugen and Richard often had to push the vehicle up steep roads. Benz reached Pforzheim somewhat after dusk, notifying her husband of her successful journey by telegram. She drove back to Mannheim several days later. The novel trip received a great deal of publicity, as she had sought. The drive was a key event in the technical development of the automobile. The pioneering couple introduced several improvements after Bertha's experiences. She reported everything that had happened along the way and made important suggestions, such as the introduction of an additional gear for climbing hills and brake linings to improve brake-power. Her trip demonstrated to the burgeoning automotive industry that test drives were essential to their business.