Karl Friedrich Benz, sometimes spelled as Carl, (November 25, 1844, Mühlburg (Karlsruhe), – April 4, 1929, Ladenburg, Germany) was a German engine designer and automobile engineer, generally regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile and pioneering founder of the automobile manufacturer, Mercedes-Benz. Other German contemporaries, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach working as partners, also worked on similar types of inventions, without knowledge of the work of the other, but Benz patented his work first and, after that, patented all of the processes that made the internal combustion engine feasible for use in automobiles. In 1886 Benz was granted a patent for his first automobile.
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Benz's Factory and his first inventions (1871 to 1882) 3 Benz's Gasmotoren-Fabrik Mannheim (1882 to 1883)
4 Benz & Cie. and the Motorwagen
5 Benz & Cie. expansion
6 Benz Söhne (1906 to 1923)
7 Toward Daimler-Benz and the first Mercedes-Benz in 1926
8 See also
9 Notes
10 References
11 External links
EARLY LIFEKarl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant, in Karlsruhe, Baden, which is part of modern Germany, to Josephine Vaillant and a locomotive driver, Johann George Benz, whom she married a few months later.[1][2][3][4][5] When he was two years old, his father was killed in a railway accident, and his name was changed to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father.[6]
Despite living in near poverty, his mother strove to give him a good education. Benz attended the local Grammar School in Karlsruhe and was a prodigious student. In 1853, at the age of nine he started at the scientifically oriented Lyzeum. Next he studied in the Poly-Technical University under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher.
Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but eventually followed his father's steps toward locomotive engineering. On September 30, 1860, at age fifteen, he passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, which he subsequently attended. Benz was graduated July 9, 1864 at nineteen.
During these years, while riding his bicycle, he started to envision concepts for a vehicle that would eventually become the horseless carriage.
Following his formal education, Benz had seven years of professional training in several companies, but did not fit well in any of them. The training started in Karlsruhe with two years of varied jobs in a mechanical engineering company.He then moved to Mannheim to work as a draftsman and designer in a scales factory. In 1868 he went to Pforzheim to work for a bridge building company Gebrüder Benckiser Eisenwerke und Maschinenfabrik. Finally, he went to Vienna for a short period to work at an iron construction company.
[edit] Benz's Factory and his first inventions (1871 to 1882)
In 1871, at the age of twenty-seven, Karl Benz joined August Ritter in launching a mechanical workshop in Mannheim, also dedicated to supplying construction materials: the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop, later renamed, Factory for Machines for Sheet-metal Working.
The enterprise's first year was a complete disaster. Ritter turned out to be unreliable and local authorities confiscated the business. The difficulty was solved when his fiancée Bertha Ringer bought Ritter's shares using her dowry.
Benz's Gasmotoren-Fabrik Mannheim (1882 to 1883)
Problems arose again when the banks at Mannheim demanded that Karl Benz's Gas Factory enterprise be incorporated due to the high production costs it maintained. Benz was forced to improvise an association with photographer Emil Bühler and his brother (a cheese merchant), in order to get additional bank support. The company became the joint-stock company Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim in 1882.
After all the necessary agreements, Benz was unhappy because he was left with merely five percent of the shares and a modest position as director. Worst of all, his ideas weren't considered when designing new products, so he withdrew from that corporation just one year later, in 1883.
[edit] Benz & Cie. and the MotorwagenBenz's lifelong hobby brought him to a bicycle repair shop in Mannheim owned by Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Eßlinger. In 1883, the three founded a new company producing industrial machines: Benz & Company Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik, usually referred to as, Benz & Cie. Quickly growing to twenty-five employees, it soon began to produce static gas engines as well.
The success of the company gave Benz the opportunity to indulge in his old passion of designing a horseless carriage. Based on his experience with, and fondness for, bicycles, he used similar technology when he created an automobile. It featured wire wheels (unlike carriages' wooden ones) [7] with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition [8] and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator.[8] Power was transmitted by means of two roller chains to the rear axle. Karl Benz finished his creation in 1885 and named it the Benz Patent Motorwagen.
It was the first automobile entirely designed as such to generate its own power, not simply a motorized stage coach or horse carriage, which is why Karl Benz was granted his patent and is regarded as its inventor.
The Motorwagen was patented on January 29, 1886 as DRP-37435: "automobile fueled by gas".[9] The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. The next year Benz created the Motorwagen Model 2 which had several modifications, and in 1887, the definitive Model 3 with wooden wheels was introduced, showing at the Paris Expo the same year.[8]
Early customers could only buy gasoline from pharmacies that sold small quantities as a cleaning product. The early-1888 version of the Motorwagen had no gears and could not climb hills unaided. This limitation was rectified after Bertha Benz made her famous trip driving one of the vehicles a great distance and suggested to her husband the addition of another gear.
The popular story about this first long distance automobile trip is that, supposedly without the knowledge of her husband, on the morning of August 5, 1888, Bertha Benz took this vehicle on a 106 km (65 mile) trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother, taking her sons Eugen and Richard with her. In addition to having to locate fuel at pharmacies on the way, she also overcame various technical and mechanical problems and finally arrived at nightfall, announcing the achievement to Karl by telegram. It had been her intention to demonstrate the feasibility of using her husband's invention for travel and to obtain publicity that would make more people aware of it. Today the event is celebrated every two years in Germany with an antique automobile rally. In 2008 Bertha Benz Memorial Route[10] was officially approved as a route of industrial heritage of mankind, because it follows Bertha Benz's tracks of the world's first long-distance journey by automobile in 1888. Now everybody can follow the 194 km of signposted route from Mannheim via Heidelberg to Pforzheim (Black Forest) and back.
Benz's Model 3 made its wide-scale debut to the world in the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, and about twenty-five Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893.
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