The German Genius

by the time he was thirty he had his own small workshop where he built gas engines. His company started as the Mannheim Gas Engine Company but was changed to Benz and Company in 1883. A year later he constructed his first internal combustion engine, using a slide valve and an electric ignition. There were many possible uses for such an engine, and he had a number of flat disagreements with his partner, Emil Bühler, who would not permit any money to be spent on a “horseless carriage.” Benz therefore started out again with a new partner, Max Rose. He too was skeptical about horseless carriages, but he did earmark a small tranche of capital “for experiments.” It was this capital that allowed Benz to construct the vehicle from which the automobilism of the world has sprung. Benz knew that the weight of the engine was crucial to success and that it had to be a good deal lighter than any gas engine produced thus far. Until that point, his stationary engines had produced about 120 rpm (revolutions per minute), and he knew he had to more than double that. His other crucial early decision was to have four cylinders and not two, because road vehicles, he felt, would need to keep changing their speed. He situated his engine on its side, the flywheel running horizontally, so that gyroscopic action, when turning corners, would not interfere with the engine’s running. His instinct was to place the engine at the rear, over the two back wheels, using the front ones for steering, as happened with tricycles, then in common use. The power would be connected to the wheels by chains. The fuel used—benzene—was vaporized by a surface carburetor, patented on January 29, 1886. The coolant was water.
    According to St. John Nixon in his history of automobiles, it is “beyond doubt that the vehicle was ready for trial during the spring of 1885. It was driven by Benz around a cinder track which adjoined his workshop. His wife and children were present when this event took place.” 20 The vehicle was probably first tried on public roads in October 1885. That, at least, was confirmed by an old employee in 1933. By the end of the year, Benz had clocked all of 1,000 meters, at a speed of around 12 kph. However, the vehicle suffered mechanical or electrical trouble each time it was taken out.
    Benz’s immediate aim was to drive his vehicle twice around Mannheim without stopping. He was forced to do it after dark; otherwise his contraption attracted huge crowds, and he was worried that the police might forbid him access to the public highways. Night after night he put someone in the passenger seat, started the engine, and traveled farther and farther before the inevitable breakdown. Then, in a journey that St. John Nixon insists ranks with George Stephenson’s, he finally made the double circuit nonstop. It made news, the Neue Badische Landeszeitung reporting the events in its issue of June 4, 1886. This part of the story, however, does not have a happy ending. To begin with, Benz’s innovations were successful and, by 1900, he was building more than 600 automobiles a year. But he failed to develop what he had given to the world, and the improvements he made to his cars were little more than tinkerings so that others like Gottlieb Daimler overtook him. 21
    Born in Schorndorf in 1834, Daimler was apprenticed to a gunmaker before becoming an engineer. 22 In 1872, at the age of thirty-eight, he was made technical director of Otto and Langen, gas-engine manufacturers of Deutz. He worked there for just short of a decade and in that time he helped develop the internal combustion engine. In 1882, however, he fell out with his fellow engineers over the direction of research and bought himself a property at Cannstatt, where he could continue in the direction he wanted to go. His old colleague, Wilhelm Maybach, was with him.
    Daimler was convinced that the internal combustion engine had a spectacular future but only if two problems were solved. One, the engines constructed until that point turned over much too slowly. And two, if this were to be overcome, a different system of ignition was needed. At that stage the most commonly used ignition employed a slide valve which, for a moment, retreated and exposed the explosive mixture in the cylinder to a flame. Daimler’s instinct told him that any valve system would never be able to close quickly enough at high speeds to allow for the full effects of the explosion to be conserved. In 1879, Leo