The first modern motor car

The story

Roads without engines

At the end of the 19th century, in town and country, people got around on foot, on horseback, in carriages, by bicycle, on horse-drawn trams or, for long distances, by train. The streets were full of horses, and of a problem nobody knew how to solve: tons of dung and the smell. Meanwhile engines were being born. The steam engine was huge and slow to start, and not suited to a small vehicle. A light, powerful engine was needed.

The solution was the internal combustion engine, in which a fuel is burned inside a cylinder, pushing a piston. In 1876 the German Nikolaus Otto built a four-stroke gas engine: intake, compression, explosion and exhaust. It worked well, but it used gas, which you cannot carry with you. The right idea was to use a liquid fuel, such as petrol, a product of oil that was then used mostly for removing stains.

Karl Benz

Karl Benz was born in 1844 in Karlsruhe, in Germany, the son of a locomotive driver who died when he was two. His mother, with great sacrifices, paid for his studies. He became an engineer and opened a small engine factory in Mannheim. For years he had dreamed of a “carriage without horses”, and he worked with a single-cylinder engine that burned petrol: light, with about one horsepower, a horizontal flywheel and electric ignition.

Benz did not simply put an engine on a carriage: he understood that the vehicle and the engine had to be designed together. He built a small three-wheeled vehicle, with a frame of steel tubes and spoked wheels like those of a bicycle, with the rear wheels driven by a chain and a single seat. On 29 January 1886 he applied for a patent for it, granted on 2 November with the number 37435: it is considered the birth certificate of the automobile. The vehicle was called the “Benz Patent-Motorwagen”, meaning “patented motor car”.

In the same period, in another German city, Stuttgart, two other Germans, Gottlieb Daimler and his collaborator Wilhelm Maybach, built another machine, with a similar engine mounted on a four-wheeled carriage (1886) and, the year before, on a wooden bicycle, the first motorcycle. The two groups did not know each other: later their companies would merge, creating Mercedes-Benz.

Bertha's first trip

At first people found the machine noisy, dangerous and useless. Benz was a perfectionist, and doubted it himself: he tested it only at night and in secret. It was his wife Bertha who gave him the decisive push. One morning in August 1888, at dawn, without telling him, she took the machine, with their two teenage sons Eugen and Richard, and set off from Mannheim to visit her mother at Pforzheim, more than a hundred kilometres away. It was the first long journey in an automobile.

It was a journey full of surprises. The tank was small, and Bertha had to buy a cleaning solvent, “ligroin”, at a chemist's in Wiesloch, which is therefore considered the world's first filling station. When a fuel pipe got blocked, she cleared it with a hatpin; when a wire came bare, she insulated it with a garter; and when the wooden brakes wore out, she had a cobbler fit pieces of leather: these were the first brake pads. She arrived in the evening, and sent her husband a telegram to let him know. The journey got all Germany talking and showed that the automobile worked.

From the car for a few to the car for everyone

The first cars were expensive, reserved for a few rich people. In 1908 the American Henry Ford introduced the “Model T”, simple, sturdy and cheap, and from 1913 he had it built on an assembly line, in which the work passes in front of the workers, who always repeat the same operation. The building time fell from twelve hours to less than two, and the price dropped: millions of Americans could afford a car.

In Italy the first petrol-engined vehicle was the tricycle of the engineer Enrico Bernardi of Padua (1894), and in 1899 Fiat was founded in Turin, the “Fabbrica italiana automobili Torino” (“Italian Automobile Factory of Turin”).