Carl Benz

Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant was born on November 25, 1844, in Mühlburg, a village that is now part of Karlsruhe, Germany. He grew up in modest circumstances; his father, a locomotive driver, died when Karl was two, and he took the surname Benz from his mother's second husband. He studied mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Karlsruhe and spent the 1860s and 1870s working in machine shops and foundries before opening his own workshop in Mannheim in 1871. That shop, which initially made scales and later stationary engines, became the base for his automotive experiments. By the mid-1880s, Benz had built a lightweight, single-cylinder four-stroke engine and mounted it on a three-wheeled chassis. The result, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, was completed in 1885 and patented in 1886 (DRP No. 37435), the same year he drove it publicly in Mannheim. The vehicle is widely recognized as the first practical automobile designed for series production. Benz & Cie., the company he formed in Mannheim, grew into the world's first automobile plant and, by the 1890s, the largest of its kind, producing thousands of cars and employing hundreds of workers. Benz's later years brought both expansion and change. He left the active management of Benz & Cie. in 1903 and retired from the company in 1906, though he remained a shareholder. In 1926, Benz & Cie. merged with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to create Daimler-Benz, the company behind the Mercedes-Benz brand. Benz died on April 4, 1929, in Ladenburg, Germany, at age 84. His wife, Bertha Benz, whose 1888 drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim demonstrated the car's practicality, was an early and active partner in the enterprise. For his work, Benz is often called the father of the automobile.[edit]

The notice that ran in the New York Times on 5 April 1929 was plain and direct: "Carl Benz, 84, Dies; Made First Auto." The paper reported that he had died the previous night at Ladenburg, near Mannheim, in his eighty-fifth year, and it reached back more than half a century to credit him with the first two-stroke motor. That obituary is the fullest contemporaneous account of his passing we have, and it gives us the essentials without ornament.

He was 84, and the death came at his home in Ladenburg, the town near Mannheim where he had spent his later years. The record does not extend much beyond that. No cause of death was reported, and nothing in the contemporary reporting suggests anything other than a natural end at an advanced age. There is no account of his final days or of a last public appearance. What we have is the obituary's simple phrase, "died last night," and the date, 4 April 1929.

The tributes were institutional rather than public spectacle. His standing was already secure through Benz & Cie., which had merged with Daimler in 1926 to form Mercedes-Benz, and his name would later be carried into the Automotive Hall of Fame. The Patent-Motorwagen itself became the focus of commemoration: museum displays at Beaulieu and the Petersen keep the machine in view, and Mercedes-Benz marked the 140th anniversary of the 1886 patent with a global tour of three S-Class sedans named Bertha, Carl and Gottlieb, which covered 65,000 km through 55 countries over nine months and finished with a celebration for 15,000 guests. Recent coverage has also revisited the contested claim that he "invented the car," tracing part of that narrative to later propaganda rather than to the record. The funeral and burial were not made public, and the family issued no statement that has come down to us.[edit]