Bertha Benz Timeline

Bertha Benz 14

1849 Bertha Benz born in Pforzheim Unfortunately only a girl again Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is born third of nine children into a prosperous carpenter's family. In the family Bible her father records her birth with the note that it is, unfortunately, only a girl again. She later said she read it as a child and decided what to do about it. Higher education is closed to women in the Grand Duchy of Baden, so she does not get any.
1870 She buys out the business partner Two years before the wedding, deliberately Carl Benz's iron foundry is failing and his partner August Ritter is making it worse. Bertha, then twenty-one and engaged to Benz, has her dowry paid out early and uses it to buy Ritter out. She can only do this because she is not yet married — an unmarried woman in Baden may act as an investor in her own right. The timing is not an accident.
1872 Marriage, and the loss of legal standing Pforzheim, 20 July Bertha Ringer marries Carl Benz. Under the law of the day she immediately ceases to be an investor in the business she funded, and her money becomes his. She goes on financing him for the next fifteen years with no legal claim to any of it, and no formal role in the company that eventually bears his name.
1879 Benz's petrol engine runs on New Year's Eve A workshop in Mannheim After a night of failed attempts, Karl Benz's two-stroke petrol engine finally runs on the last evening of 1879. His wife Bertha, who has funded much of the work with her dowry, is there to hear it. He patents it the following year and it becomes the financial foundation for everything that follows.
1883 Benz & Cie founded in Mannheim The third attempt After two earlier ventures collapse, Benz & Cie Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik is founded in Mannheim. It sells stationary gas engines, which finally makes money, which finally gives Carl Benz the time and cash to build a vehicle. Bertha works alongside him on the technical problems, including winding the wire induction coils for the ignition by hand.
1886 The Benz Patent-Motorwagen Patent DRP 37435 Benz files patent number 37435 for a "vehicle powered by a gas engine" — a three-wheeled machine designed as a single integrated unit rather than a carriage with an engine strapped on. It is generally taken as the birth certificate of the automobile. Almost nobody buys one for two years.
1888 Bertha Benz drives to Pforzheim The first road trip Without telling her husband, Bertha Benz takes the Motorwagen and her two teenage sons on a hundred-and-six-kilometre run from Mannheim to Pforzheim. She buys fuel at a pharmacy, clears a blocked fuel line with a hatpin, insulates a wire with her garter and has a cobbler nail leather to the brake blocks — inventing the brake lining. The press coverage turns an eccentric contraption into a product, and her observations on the way lead directly to the addition of a lower gear.
1888 Munich, and the first buyers The point of the whole exercise Weeks after the Pforzheim drive, the Motorwagen is shown at the Munich Engineering Exposition and wins a gold medal. Newspapers that had ignored the machine for two years now have a story about a woman and two boys crossing Baden in one. Orders follow. Emile Roger in Paris begins selling them in France. The company Bertha funded finally has a product.
1906 Ladenburg, and Carl Benz Söhne Starting again, with the sons Squeezed out of decision-making at Benz & Cie by its shareholders and directors, Carl Benz moves the family to Ladenburg and sets up a new firm with his sons Eugen and Richard. Bertha buys the house. It is where she lives for the rest of her life and it is now a museum.
1926 Daimler-Benz Two garden sheds, forty years apart Benz & Cie merges with Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form Daimler-Benz. Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler had worked roughly a hundred kilometres apart on the same problem in the 1880s and are generally believed never to have met. Daimler had been dead for twenty-six years by the time the companies joined.
1929 Carl Benz dies Fifty-seven years of marriage Carl Benz dies at Ladenburg at eighty-four, five decades after the engine first ran on that New Year's Eve. Bertha outlives him by fifteen years.
1944 Honorary senator, on her 95th birthday Karlsruhe, at last The Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe — where her husband had studied and where she had not been permitted to — makes Bertha Benz an honorary senator on 3 May 1944, her ninety-fifth birthday. It is the only formal recognition she receives in her lifetime.
1944 Bertha Benz dies at Ladenburg Two days later Bertha Benz dies at home in Ladenburg on 5 May 1944, two days after the honour and her birthday, at ninety-five. She had gone on driving well into old age.
2016 Automotive Hall of Fame Seventy-two years later Bertha Benz is inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. The route from Mannheim to Pforzheim is now a signposted heritage road, and the pharmacy in Wiesloch where she bought ligroin markets itself as the first filling station in the world. Her financial and engineering contributions were largely absent from the standard accounts until the twenty-first century.