Benz Builds the First Automobile
- Date
- 1885-1886
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Germany
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
In 1885 the German engineer Carl Benz completed the Patent-Motorwagen, a three-wheeled vehicle powered by a compact, high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke internal-combustion engine, generally regarded as the world's first practical automobile.
Benz filed a patent application on 29 January 1886 for a "vehicle powered by a gas engine," granted as patent No. 37435, often called the birth certificate of the motorcar, and unveiled the vehicle publicly in Mannheim in July 1886. The Motorwagen integrated electric ignition, a carburetor, a cooling system, transmission, and brakes into a self-propelled chassis. In 1888 Benz's wife Bertha drove one over sixty miles between Mannheim and Pforzheim, demonstrating its practicality and generating publicity. The internal-combustion automobile, developed in parallel by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, would reshape transportation, urban form, industry, and warfare in the twentieth century. Powered by refined petroleum, it spurred the rise of the oil economy and, through mass production methods perfected later by others, became one of the defining consumer technologies of the modern world. Benz's machine marks the practical origin of personal motorised transport.
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Empires active in 1885-1886
- German Empire1871 CE – 1918 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Haber-Bosch Process Industrialises Synthetic Nitrogen FertiliserSeptember 1913
- Germ Theory of Disease Established by Pasteur and Koch1882 (Koch's tuberculosis bacillus, 24 March)
- Edison's Electric Light and Central Power1879 (Pearl Street 1882)
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
- Discovery of X-rays and radioactivity1895–1898
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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