The story of Bertha Benz: The boss behind Benz

Bertha Ringer was 23 when she married Karl Benz, who would go on to be credited with the invention of the automobile. But not many people know that it was Bertha who made it all happen.

This was the late 1800s, when unmarried daughters from wealthy families held dowries that would become their husband’s property once they tied the knot. It was Bertha’s investment in Benz & Cie, Karl’s new business, that funded the invention that would change the game: the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Before it was called a car, Karl described his revolutionary idea as “a horseless carriage”.

Karl was a design genius – but nobody would have known that if it weren’t for Bertha.

In 1888, Bertha unsuccessfully encouraged Karl to take the Patent-Motorwagen No. 3 out for a spin to show people what he’d been tinkering with. When he refused to do more than a short test drive and insisted his creation needed to be absolutely perfect before it could be shown off, she took matters into her own hands.

On an early morning in August of that year, Bertha left a vague note for her husband, got her sons Eugen and Richard out of bed and embarked on what would become the first ever long-distance road trip by automobile.

From their home in Mannheim, Germany, the three Benzes travelled 106km to Pforzheim, where Bertha’s mother lived, in the three-wheeled, open-air vehicle that reached a maximum speed of around 30km/h downhill. The trip took around 15 hours all up, and it wasn’t until they arrived that night that Bertha sent Karl a telegram explaining what she’d done.

This was no regular all-day road trip, though. When cars didn’t exist, services to fix or fill them didn’t either. There was no stopping at the servo for petrol and a drink. Instead, Bertha purchased Benzine from pharmacies every 15 or 20 miles to use as gas. She also needed to stop regularly to refill the water in the vehicle’s cooling system.

Bertha used other ingenious hacks to keep the trip on track: when a valve started to leak, she used her garter like a tourniquet to patch it up; her hairpins were the ideal size to clear clogged valves, and she enlisted local cobblers to supply leather to replace worn brake linings. More than just an early investor and enthusiastic wife, Bertha proved on this trip that she was a key part of the Benz automobile team.

Along the way, she kept tabs on all of these fixes and reported back to Karl once she and the boys returned home a few days later. One of her noted adjustments was the introduction of a lower gear, allowing the vehicle to climb hills more easily.

Now that Bertha had shown the world what the car could do, everybody wanted to try one for themselves. Karl, having taken Benz’s first test driver’s advice – his wife’s – on board, was rewarded with a gold medal at the 1888 Munich Engineering Exposition and started receiving orders for his refined invention.

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