Happy Birthday to the Automobile, Born Aug. 26, 1885

The automobile was born on August 26, 1885.

That is the day Gottlieb Daimler filed a patent for his ‘riding car’, the world’s first vehicle with an internal combustion engine.

Dr. Carl Benz registered a patent for a similar device six months earlier, with three wheels and large enough to carry passengers.

So you could say that the automobile has two birthdays.  Or, that this is the birthday of the motorcycle, even though Daimler called it a “riding car”, and that the Benz patent is the birthday of the automobile.

Daimler’s patent also was also nearly one month after Karl’s wife Bertha Benz put two of their five children into one of his contraptions to drive the 66 miles from home to in Mannheim to visit her mother in Pforzheim.

That was the first documented drive by a woman,  making headlines along the way, and helped sell her husband’s contraption.  Perhaps it motivated Daimler to move forward (pun intended) on his design.

The world would never be the same, and more than 100 years later, engineers and designers continue to tinker with the size, power and performance of the vehicles we drive and ride.

Daimler put a motor on a two-wheel vehicle, so purists might say this is the first motorized bicycle or the first motorcycle, not the first car.  Let’s not quibble.

This was the start of motorized personal mobility.

It took another year for his patent to be awarded, by which time engineer Carl Benz had applied for a patent on a three-wheel motorized vehicle, the Patent Motor Car.

That same year, 1886,  Daimler created a four-wheeled Motor Carriage.

• ecoXplorer Fabulous Fact:  the word automobile comes from the Greek auto, meaning self, and the Latin mobilis, or mobile.

These first motorized vehicles proved  that the internal combustion engine was capable of driving a human-controlled road vehicle.

Until Daimler’s little engine, motors were huge, heavy, stationary affairs.

Daimler’s design proved that an engine could be small, efficient and powerful, and that a motorized riding car could be a compact design, far smaller than huge horse-drawn carriages.

As I said, the rest is history.

Automotive History, Briefly

A year later, Ransom Olds of Lansing, Michigan developed a three-wheeled vehicle that became known as the Oldsmobile.

By the turn of the last century, 1900, Henry Ford was producing cars in nearby Detroit, and two brothers named Stanley, in Maine, designed a steam-powered vehicle that became known as the Stanley Steamer.

In South Bend, Indiana, The Studebaker Brothers modernized the family’s horse-wagon business by getting rid of the horses and adding a motor and a steering wheel.

Daimler re-named his car company Mercedes, after the daughter of his primary customer.

Daimler and Benz were competitors for the small but growing market until after WWI, when German banks forced a merger to save money by combining R&D, production, etc.

A lot has changed in 100+ years.  Many of those original automotive pioneers went out of business or merged — such as the merger between competitors Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz.

What has not changed is that the automobile is constantly being re-invented and improved.

Besides entirely new car companies with names like Tesla, Lucid and Rivian, there are entirely new technologies powering our vehicles, such as the hydrogen fuel cell, and the electric car is back, a century after disappearing.

The original Carl Benz three-wheel motorcar is on display at the German Transportation Museum in Munich.

A copy is on display at the Mercedes-Benz Museum, next to company headquarters in Stuttgart.

Also in Stuttgart is the Porsche Museum. Ferdinand Porsche had been a designer and engineer for Gottlieb Daimler before launching his own company to focus on racing.  But that’s a whole other story.

Copyright (C) Evelyn Kanter

ecoXplorer Evelyn Kanter is a journalist with 20+ years of experience as a newspaper and magazine writer, radio & TV news producer & reporter, and guidebook and smartphone app author – all focusing on travel, automotive, the environment and your rights as a consumer.

ecoXplorer Evelyn Kanter currently serves as President Emeritus of the International Motor Press Assn. (IMPA.org) and is a member of the North American Travel Journalists Assn. (NATJA) and the North American Snowsports Journalists Assn (NASJA).

Contact me at evelyn@ecoxplorer.com.