If you were to listen to any general conversation about great vehicles you are just about certain that the brand Mercedes Benz will come up. The Mercedes Benz franchise is known for producing elegant and powerful luxury automobiles for the high-end market. German engineering is renowned and sought after because of Mercedes Benz. With a company this great and famous, do you wonder how it all started? What was the mercedes first car and how was it made? What inspired its design and its life story? Does this car have any connection or significance to how automobiles came to be today?
Going back in time, the very first Benz car goes back to 1926, first appearing under the name Daimler-Benz, but goes further back to 1901 as Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft’s Mercedes, and is finally rooted to 1886 which was the year it became popular as Karl Benz’s Motorwagen, otherwise known as the Benz Patent Motor Car. The Mercedes actually ran for the first time in 1879 on New Year’s Eve and continued to be built with the creator’s dream of a lightweight car with the chassis and engine forming a singe unit. At a very young age, Karl Benz envisioned a unique engine, a vehicle that he wished to be branded as the horseless carriage. It was completed in 1885 and then Benz applied for the patent in 1886, on which he was granted the patent number 37435 serving as the car’s birthright.
This elegant automobile, as the inventor has imagined, indeed looked more like a carriage. It had only one cylinder, specifically a 954 cc single-cylinder stabilized by a flywheel, had a four-stroke engine working on four cycles with the ignition having a vibrator coil, and worked at 0.75 hp or around 0.50 kilowatt output at 250 rpm. There were seats for two people. It was three-wheeled and self-propelled. A similar mechanism compared to modern cars is the pushrod operated mushroom valve. He continued to improve his invention by adding a carburettor, fuel tank and shoe brake.
It is said that behind every man’s success is a woman, which proved to be true for Karl Benz. His wife Bertha definitely played a big role in his invention. From being his fiancée and her dowry saving him from a downfall on an investment, to publicizing his work further through promoting the motor car by taking it out for a 120-mile tour with their two sons, which became known as the first long distance road trip. The gasoline engine powered car came to significantly change the world, because it does not only mark its place as the mercedes first car but is the first automobile in history powered by an internal combustion engine.
Great engineering work has always been the hallmark of a Mercedes Benz automobile. This company is clearly being driven by innovation in their business for it is able to make each and every new model of a Mercedes Benz car a notable example. From the starting point in time of the Mercedes Benz company until the present, the firm has been striving to improve and push the boundaries of new design and functionality in each and every vehicle that it creates. Now that you know a bit of backstory on how the first Mercedes Benz was made, why not join in the conversation and add a little color into it by telling others of the wonderful and exciting history of Karl Benz and his wife Bertha and the curious way they publicized the groundbreaking Benz-Patent Motorwagen?
