First Automobile part II

The first test runs of the vehicle were done in the open yard of the Esslingen Engineering Works and after that this first Daimler automobile with Wilhelm Maybach at the wheel then trundled through the gardens of Daimler’s experimental shop. Thus was born the first Daimler automobile but just as it had happened with the motorcycle, Gottlieb Daimler now wanted to pursue many other modes of transportation where his engines could be applied to. A motorboat was the next application followed by a rail cycle for the Stuttgart Street Railway as also a fire engine. While engines were yet built at the same small premises at Cannstatt, much of the work associated with the various projects was subcontracted to the Kurtz Bell Foundry and Esslingen Engineering Works. Daimler was also thinking in terms of aeronautics. In October, 1887, he read a story in an illustrated weekly of the successful trial flight of Dr Wolfert, a Leipzig book dealer, in a free balloon. The first test runs of the vehicle were done in the open yard of the Esslingen Engineering Works and after that this first Daimler automobile with Wilhelm Maybach at the wheel then trundled through the gardens of Daimler’s experimental shop. Thus was born the first Daimler automobile but just as it had happened with the motorcycle, Gottlieb Daimler now wanted to pursue many other modes of transportation where his engines could be applied to. A motorboat was the next application followed by a rail cycle for the Stuttgart Street Railway as also a fire engine. While engines were yet built at the same small premises at Cannstatt, much of the work associated with the various projects was subcontracted to the Kurtz Bell Foundry and Esslingen Engineering Works. Daimler was also thinking in terms of aeronautics. In October, 1887, he read a story in an illustrated weekly of the successful trial flight of Dr Wolfert, a Leipzig book dealer, in a free balloon. He invited Wolfert to Cannstatt for some joint experiments. This brought about a two-horsepower engine, designed to drive two air screws, one to go forward and one to go down. It was a sort of forerunner of the helicopter. On Sunday the twelfth of August, 1888, when the wind died down, Daimler and Volfert made a trial flight from the Seelberg, and the balloon travelled four kilometres and landed, with no difficulty at Kornwestheim. A second trial flight established that the engine did what was demanded of it. Daimlder and Wolfert thus made the test flight that marked the first use of the Daimler engine for aeronautical purposes. Wolfert later met his death as one of the pioneers of flying. By this time Daimler and Maybach had also devised a V-twin engine and Maybach had even drawn up a proper automobile to house it in. There is a drawing dated December 1888 - January 1889 of this very automobile which was known to Daimler and Maybach as the ‘Steel Wheeler’. This was the first vehicle to depart from the traditional form of the horse carriages and embrace a unity of design between engine and chassis. A four-speed transmission was employed using gears. The overall design showed Maybach’s flair for minimality and it could be considered as a major step forward in the early evolution of the automobile. Within the next four to five years, Daimler engines were now being supplied all over the world and also to other automobile makers like Panhard & Levassor as also to Peugeot. In fact, the Steel Wheeler so impressed both Emile Levassor and Monsieur Panhard that they just began making it under license in France. In fact Panhard & Levassor made Daimler engines in France for marine and commercial applications and they in consultation with Daimler began supplying their motors to Peugeot for fitment in automobiles.

The first Peugeot car ran on Daimler engines in 1890 and a year later Panhard & Levassor also got into the act by making their own cars. In the ensuing years, Daimler and Maybach had managed to extricate themselves from a sticky situation where investors in their company were beginning to undermine their research activities. Daimler and Maybach got out of this predicament by setting up another operation which went by the name of Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft and which was to form one half of the giant firm which we know of today as Daimler-Benz. While Daimler remained content with making and developing engines to power as many known forms of transportation vehicles as possible, his trusted lieutenant Wilhelm Maybach not only went about evolving automobiles but also perfecting a whole host of details which went with the four-stroke engine. One of these innovations was that of the spray carburettor which has gone on to remain the basis of modern carburettor design in which the spray carburettor adjusted the mixture of gasoline and air according to the requirements of different loads on the engine and also the engine speed, This carburettor first saw duty on an in-line two-cylinder engine which was also the first such in automotive history. This Daimler two-cylinder in-line engine remained in production til1 1897 but from 1898 onwards a transition was made to a four cylinder in-line unit and Daimler cars were on their way to world domination. Sadly, Gottlieb Daimler never lived long to see his cars attain the pinnacle of recognition. On March 6, 1990 he passed away, just a few weeks before his powerful racing cars, now christened Mercedes, appeared on the scene. These Mercedes sports cars ran rings around their competition and won most of the major races then. The legend was well and truly on. So there we have it, the early work of Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach pertaining exclusively to the first two-wheeler as also the first four-wheeler but that yet leaves us with the three-wheeler which was pioneered by none other than Karl Benz, the second and just as illustrious half of the Daimler-Benz partnership A partnership which only happened in the late 1920s! Karl Benz displayed a fondness for railway locomotives during his childhood. This was but natural considering that his late father was a railway engineer and locomotion on rails was a very exciting proposition for those with a mechanical bent in the second half of the last century. After his early schooling he enrolled at the Karlsruhe Polytechnikum and in July 1864, after two years of formal mathematics and engine design he passed out as a qualified engineer. within a month he was working at the Karlsruhc Engineering Works which made, among other things, steam locomotives. Benz worked here till September 1866 by which time he had picked up a great deal of experience on machine tools and also on the practical aspect of steam engines and rolling stock. Remarkably enough, Karlsruhe Engineering Works played a part not only in Benz’s career but in Daimler’s as well, for three years after Benz left, Gottlieb Daimler, who was ten years older than Benz took over there as chief engineer. Their paths had almost crossed. After Karlsruhe. Benz moved on to Mannheim where for the next few years he worked at various firms until he set up a machine shop in August 1871 in a partnership with a mechanic named August Ritter. Unfortunately, Ritter could not contribute adequately to the partnership, both in terms of technical expertise or financial support. It looked as if the firm would go down under but for Bertha Ringer who was Karl Benz’s fiancee. She prevailed on her father to make a premature transfer of her dowry and this enabled Karl Benz to take full control of his machine shop. Soon after Karl Benz and Bertha Ringer were married and just as important a role she had played in making possible the independence of her husband in business, she stood by his side when the going turned tough a few years later. By 1877, the construction and fabrication business in which Karl Benz specialised in almost pulled his company down. While Bertha Benz pledged most of her worldly goods to pay for a mortgage on their engineering firm, a quirk of fate brought Karl Benz face to face with the internal combustion engine.

Benz’s financial crisis and fateful switch into engine design came just at the time when Nikolaus August Otto obtained his famous four cycle patent. The famous German patent no. 532, antedated by the award of a British patent, bore the date of August 4, 1877. Patent no. 532 compelled any builder of engines who did not wish to pay license fees to do all his experimenting with the two-cycle process. After Dugald Clerk of Glasgow, who received his first British patent in 1878, Benz was the first to have success with a two-cycle engine. Benz’s inventive gifts were revealed in the improvements over the Clerk engine in the matter of the fuel pump and the air pump. The Clerk engine was always in danger of having the fuel mixture ignite inside the pump and thereby cause a dangerous explosion, but Benz got around this hazard. Also by means of special controls governing the admission of air and gas into the cylinder, Benz had it so that the exhaust gases were first driven out through fresh air before the fuel mixture got into the cylinder. This is our first encounter with the notion of ‘scavenging air’, which became very important in two-cycle engine technology and remains so to this day. Karl Benz quickly got to grips with the idea of improving on this engine and drew upon all his powers in this creative task if only to ensure economic well being for his family. He not only got cued in to the two- stroke engine but also designed and simultaneously manufactured components for the first such engine. Benz’s engine first ran on New Year’s Eve, 1879. Karl Benz set down his own description of this great moment. These are his exact words: “After supper my wife said ‘Let’s go over to the shop and try our Luck once more. Something tells me to go and it will not let me be’. So there we were, back again, standing in front of the engine as if it were a great mystery that was impossible to solve. My heart was pounding. I turned the crank. The engine started to go ‘put-put-put’ and music of the future sounded with regular rhythm. We both listened to it run for a full hour, fascinated, never tiring of the single tone of its song. The two-cycle engine was performing as no magic flute in the world ever had. The longer it played its note, the more sorrow and anxiety it conjured away from the heart. It was the truth that if sorrow had been our companion on the way over there, joy walked beside us on the way back. For this New Year’s Eve we could well dispense with the congratulations of friends and neighbours for we had known the heartiest kind of happiness that evening in our pool little workshop, which had now become the birthplace of a new engine. We stood around in the courtyard listening for quite a while, and through the stillness of the night we could still clearly hear the ‘put-put-put’. Suddenly the bells began to ring - New Year Eve’s bells. We felt they were not only ringing in a new year, but a new era, which was to take on a new heartbeat from the all- important new instrumentality of the engine.” Further work by Karl Benz saw him receive a patent on the throttle regulator mechanism which remains the basis of modern engine control.

Titled ‘Innovations in Speed Regulation of Gas Engines’ this patent secured on October 25, 1882, is a basic patent in engine technology with relevance to this day. Benz also developed the battery driven buzzer ignition which was another fundamental advancement in engine design as it made the engine much simpler. He eliminated the special air pump by having the air compressed by the piston in the crankshaft end of the cylinder. Earlier in April 1881, Karl Benz had struck a deal with a few investors to put in much needed finance for the growth of his company known as Mannheimer Gasmotorenfabrik. The new entity was incorporated on October 14, 1882 as Gasmotorenfabrik Mannheim. Unfortunately this was not a good move because the investors did not know the business and they made unheard of demands on Karl Benz with the result that he broke off from the firm he had created. However luck was on his side because his creativity and genius brought him to the attention of two entrepreneurs with a good background in finance and management. On October 1, 1883, Karl Benz along with his new partners Max Kaspar Rose, and Friedrich Wilhelm Esslinger founded ‘Benz & Cie., Reinische Gasmotorenfabrik’ in Mannheim. With the day to day running and book keeping now in the hands of his new colleagues who were most dependable, Karl Benz was free to concentrate solely on designing developing and manufacturing a range of engines. By 1885 the engines produced by Benz ranged between one and ten horsepower outputs but a new problem which emerged was that their production facility was bursting at the seams. Again fate was kind to Karl Benz, for just a year later he managed to set up a new and an even larger factory. Buoyed by the success of his gas engines, Karl Benz now turned to thinking about fitting one in a motorcar. With his new plant already humming with activity Benz began work on a four-stroke engine of his own design which corresponded to almost the same time that Gottlieb Daimler was getting his famous vertical packaged engine ready for fitment in his motorcycle. In contrast to Daimler who always had in mind an engine of universal utility, Benz worked on the development of an engine that would be an organic part of the total design of a vehicle down to the last detail. This was to be the centre of gravity of Benz’s creative effort, wherein he anticipated the work of Daimler and Maybach, who did not begin to think of an automobile as a whole concept until 1889. The idea of a car in totality was set forth in German patent no. 37435, dated January 29.1836as ‘a vehicle with gas engine drive’. Here Karl Benz understood the term ‘gas engine’ to designate an engine ‘whose gas fuel derives from volatile substances to be processed by an apparatus included as part of the mechanism’. The drawing for the patent showed an extraordinary similarity to the actual model, which was designed to be very light. The Benz ‘patent motor car’ employed a very light single-cylinder four-stroke engine which unlike the unit in Daimler’s motorcycle was an unenclosed unit with its crankshaft and camshaft open to the elements. It delivered a max output of 0.8 horse power while spinning away at the then dizzying speed of 250 revolutions per minute.

Karl Benz’s ingenuity showed off in a couple of details on the basic power plant. The first of these involved the cooling system where to draw off the excess heat generated by the engine a steam cooling process was devised by placing a vessel on the cylinder as water supply and steam container. The second detail was the use of a horizontal flywheel. Benz decided on this because he thought a vertical one would, when negotiating corners, cause severe gyroscopic action. The camshaft, which ran at half the engine speed, actuated the valves via longish pushrods, controlled the battery run buzzer ignition coil and turned the driving pulley. This pulley was connected by a flat belt to a transmission shaft with a differential, and from here chains connected with rubber-tyres bicycle-type wire wheels. By moving the belt from the idler pulley, and vice versa, the engine could be engaged and disengaged. Engine speed could be controlled by changing the quantity of air to be admitted into the evenly rich mixture from the surface-type carburettor which altered its tendency to ignite. The Benz ‘patent motor car’ housed this unit in the rear and driving its rear wheels. It was an extraordinary vehicles in that it had but one wheel in front to steer by means of a smallish tiller type handlebar. A bench seat for two was provided. The whole vehicle weighed 263kg, of which the engine alone accounted for 96kg. At first the Benz car ran with a dynamo ignition system but Karl Benz then worked out an ignition system comprising of a Ruhmkorff coil with a buzzer interrupter, a spark plug and a chromic acid battery. This was a totally different approach to that taken by Daimler with his incandescent tube ignition, and one fraught with relatively greater difficulty compared to the battery-free simplicity of the incandescent tube ignition. However, Benz’s work was to prove much more successful in the long development process of the automotive engine because after the subsequent digression into magneto ignition battery system went from the buzzer to the single spark contained within the cylinder, which is yet the prevailing method employed in automobiles to this day. It is also pertinent to note here that given the technological development then, Karl Benz made his own spark plugs which not only worked very well but also helped spur development in this field until such time that the specialized firm set up by Robert Bosch finally brought upon the change of making these outside of the car factories and supplying them to cat makers worldwide. On July 3, 1886, the Benz three-wheeler turned its own wheels under its own power for the first time. It was run in full view of disbelieving bystanders and while there were bugs galore, it drew a favourable response. Being much away from base, and without tools, the machine plodded on slowly but the move had been made for mass motorisation by this great inventor. Sufficiently enthused by his first vehicle moving along, Karl Benz got engrossed in ironing out all the bugs of his first vehicle while his partners thought this preoccupation to be dangerous to their business interests of making and selling gas engines. Benz however didn't allow himself to be sidestepped from what he perceived - correctly at that - to be the right thing to happen to personal mobility and went about debugging his creation. By 1888, he had achieved a further four patents to add to the first patent of January 1886 for his three-wheeler, a second example of which incorporated all the advances he had made. This second example of the Benz ‘patent motor car’ now had a much sturdier chassis and it was displayed in this form on September 12, 1886 at the Munich Engine Show. Not only was the car displayed as an advance in transport but it was also offered for sale at a price of 2000 Marks, making it the first automobile in the world to be thus offered! If that was not all, Benz also offered test drives and test rides to whosoever asked of it. Not surprisingly, this set off a most favourable tone for the vehicle and it not only got a positive coverage in the German press but over 13,552 people paid to get into the Munich for Engine Show to have a look at the Benz three-wheeler. One of the many newspaper stories of the car being driven down the streets of Munich tan somewhat like this: “Seldom, if ever, have passers-by in the streets of our city seen a more startling sight than on Saturday afternoon when a one-horse chaise came from the Sendlingstrasse over Sendlingertorplatz and down Herzog Wilhelmstrasse at a good clip without any horse or thill, a gentleman sitting under the surrey top, riding on three wheels - one in front and two behind speeding on his way towards the centre of town. The amazement of everyone on the street who saw him was such that they seemed unable to grasp what they had before their eyes, and the astonishment was general and widespread.” Even though the response was encouraging, the public’s reservations to embrace this form of horseless carriage was yet too strong willed for Benz to make a commercial success of his vehicle. In fact, the German Yearbook of Natural Science for 1888 made the following remarks for both, the Benz three-wheeler as also Daimler’s motorboat: “Benz also has made a petrol car which caused some stir at the Munich Exposition. This employment of the petrol engine will probably be no more promising for the future than the use of the steam engine was for road travel.” At around this point in time, Benz also released what appears to be the first automobile advertisement in the world for his ‘Patent Motorcar’ as it was described thus in the copy. The ad spoke of the three-wheeler as “an agreeable vehicle, as well as a mountain-climbing apparatus,” capable of mounting 6 percent gradients when loaded and 8 percent gradients without load. The speed was mentioned as 76 kilometres per hour and in fact Benz had also given the operating costs to be to the tune of thirty pfennings an hour. Obviously it must have hurt that there were still no buyers though the list of the interested began to mount. It was once again left to Bertha Benz, aided by her two young sons Eugen (15 years) and Richard (13 years) to prove the vehicle and make the first ever long distance trip by motorcar. Early in the morning on a fine day in August 1888, at five o’clock, when their father was fast asleep, Eugen and Richard slowly got the car out of the garage and with their mother by their side took it out of the courtyard. Firing it to life, they set out on a historic journey. Eugen was at the steering lever with his mother next to him while Richard sat opposite her on an emergency seat, sometimes relieving his brother at the controls. They drove from Mannheim to Weinheim. Dips and rises in the road, which today’s drivers take no notice of whatsoever, were to them real menacing impediments. In Wiesloch they made their first stop, filled the radiator with water and bought petrol from the apothecary.

They went on to Bretten, and in order to get up the hill to Bauschlott, Eugen and his mother had to get out and push for all they were worth. A cobbler in Bauschlott put a new piece of leather on their block brake and they took on more water. In Wilferdingen this trio of pioneer distance drivers asked an innkeeper how they could get around the mountain blocking their way, and they were directed to Brotzingen, where they reassured themselves that after all these exertions they would have no trouble reaching Pforzheim, which was not far away. Despite the darkness - the car had no headlights! - they arrived safely in Pforzheim. Since it was pretty late in the night and tired and dusty after the long journey to go and call on their grandmother, they put up at the Gasthau ZUT Post on Ispringerstrasse.

A crowd soon collected around their car, some critical but others full of admiration. When news of the journey became known to many passers-by, one wag who was also a pessimist at heart said that it was the end of horses from now on since the mechanical horse would slay the living thing as a means of personal transport. Karl Benz was informed of the journey by telegram from Pforzheim and he was secretly happy but immediately wired back in a matter of fact manner that he wanted the final drive chains on the car back as another car had to be readied for display at a new show at Munich! The intrepid trio had not only made the journey safely but they had also taken every hardship in their stride while going onto their final destination. Enroute they had repaired a clogged fuel line from the petrol tank to the carburettor, chains that stretched and slipped off the gear wheel, a short circuit in the electrical ignition and the repeated wearing out of the brake shoes.

The boys also informed their father that the engine was too weak to climb steep gradients and Karl Benz was happy to put in an additional low gen in the transmission as the result of the feedback he received. Still sales were slow coming in and this precipitated matters between Benz and his partners. However an amicable parting of ways was adopted and Max Kaspar Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Esslinger left the firm, to be replaced by two businessmen, Friedrich von Fischer and Julius Ganss, the former taking charge of business organization while the latter was responsible for sales. This enabled Benz to devote more time to developing the motor car while at the same time more and more engines were added to the growing portfolio of horizontal gas engines for sale to the public.

While our story ends here, the Benz three-wheeler led the way to the first Benz four-wheeler in 1"893, which came with the name Viktoria. Whether this had to do with a Woman’s name or with the goddess of victory or was it because of the Victorian age there is no authentic proof. However, the Viktoria with its three-horsepower engine set Benz on the road to commercial production and buoyed with demand for this model, he came up with an even more popular small car in April 1894 known as the Benz Velo which was the first ‘mass produced’ car in the world. The rest as they say is history.

Daimler with its Mercedes branded cars and Benz with cars carrying the same name were opponents till 7924 when Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft and Benz & Cie., Rheinische Automobil und Motorengesellschaft began to combine interests in a way that led to their final merger into Daimler-Benz Aktiengesellschaft in 1926. Where formerly there had been competition and struggle, one against the other, there was now to be a common task and an even higher sense of responsibility and objectives. Karl Benz was alive and ticking during the merger and he was made a director on the board. However, he did not live long to see the new firm progress to greater glory for he died on April 4, 1929.

The motorcar which in its early years hardly moved faster than a horse drawn carriage and whose technical frailties made every journey fraught with breakdowns, is today taken as the pinnacle of personal mobility, allowing journeys to be taken with speed, comfort and safety, with a high degree of reliability and with economic operation plus. The progress made by the automobile has been astounding in the present century but were it not for the opening chapter in its development penned by the likes of Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz plus also ‘Wilhelm Maybach, the internal combustion engine might not have got this far.