Making History On Wheels
Newcastle Herald
Saturday January 28, 2006
Karl Benz set the wheels in motion, writes Brent Davison.
TO say that life was a whole lot simpler 120 years ago would be a huge understatement.No telephones, no computers, no television or radio, and little use of that new-fangled electricity.Not many cars on the road either. None, in fact. But getting stomped on by a horse or hit by a penny-farthing bicycle while crossing the road was a real risk.Then in 1886 a fellow named Karl Benz came along and changed the whole dynamic with his motorised horseless carriage, a vehicle which celebrates its 120th anniversary tomorrow.Benz applied for a patent for his carriage on January 29, 1886, and when patent number 37435a was granted in November 1886, the Patent Motor Car (as it has since become known) was officially recognised as the world's first car.Not that it had much in common with what we have come to know as a car but, with its tubular steel chassis, it did not have much in common with the average carriage or buggy of the time, either.There were only three wheels for a start (one up front, two at the back) and it was driver-steered (although by a tiller arrangement rather than a steering wheel).The 1.7-litre (small for the time), liquid-cooled, single-cylinder, four-stroke engine ran on petrol which was fed into it by a carburettor and developed a huge 1.5 horsepower about 1.1 kilowatts at a leisurely 250rpm.It had electric ignition, was mounted horizontally and tucked up behind the bench seat. There were no conventional step-down gears like we have today, just a direct drive from engine to rear axle. Braking, incidentally, was handled by rear-wheel transmission brake operated by a belt-control lever.About 15 kmh was considered a good cruising speed for the car, as was a 35 litres/100 kilometres (eight miles per gallon) fuel economy. A good thing petrol was cheap in those days!Benz built three of the cars in 1888 and one of them was driven into fame by Karl's wife Bertha who, with her two sons, borrowed one of them (apparently without Karl's knowledge, thus becoming probably the world's first car thief!) and drove 100 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim, a feat that helped Karl sell a lot more cars.Once he had worked out how to steer two front wheels at the same time, Karl developed and built the four-wheeled Victoria, with the first examples hitting the roads of Europe in 1893.
© 2006 Newcastle Herald