The Invention of the Automobile - (Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler)

Ltd.).

INTRODUCTION

THERE are a number of features in connection with the automobile which cause it to stand out from all other engineering inventions, but one of the most remarkable is the fact that although it has revolutionized the whole face of human existence as perhaps no other scientific invention in this or in any other age and that public interest in the very early designs of such vehicles is increasing rapidly, yet there is not more than a handful of people who can correctly name its inventor. Such apathy becomes still more difficult to explain when the motor vehicle is compared to other scientific achievements; the very mention of wireless, the locomotive and the phonograph causes immediately the names of Marconi, Stephenson and Edison to come to mind, but not so with the automobile. The public now takes a keen interest in motor vehicles of the last century, but it is content to accept them as though they were the product of Nature, in which the hand of man has played no more important role than has the gardener when an orchard produces a good crop of fruit; its production, the marvels it performs, whence it came and by whose hand are matters which the present generation of roadfarers are content to accept as a fait accompli. They reap the fruits of an idea which first began to smoulder in the brain of an engineering student, developed while he was working at stationary two-stroke gas engines in a dingy workshop in a back street of Mannheim, and finally came to fruition when he hardly had the means to provide the common necessities of life.

They know nothing and care nothing for the fact that the invention of the automobile produced a degree of hardship in the family circle of Karl Benz and his courageous wife which would have broken the spirit of any with less faith in the future of the horseless vehicle. Frau Benz is responsible in large part for the success of her husband’s work in this direction, for although she knew nothing of engineering, she had implicit faith in his gifts, and by force of character and natural affection her encouragement to him served to counteract all the discouragement and ridicule which was heaped on him elsewhere.

He had to carry out his first experiments in 1883-4, not only single-handed but in secrecy, for any hint that he was occupying his time with horseless vehicles would have entailed withdrawal of the slender financial support obtained from a so-called partner, even if it would not have exposed him to the risk of being regarded as an engineering crank or a harmless lunatic. The modern motorist who has never troubled himself about who invented the motor-car would do well to visualize, if he can, the enormity of the problem which Benz set himself the task of solving. In the face of public prejudice, he was trying to popularize and manufacture small two-stroke gas engines for driving pumps, etc.; he had therefore nothing more advanced towards the complete motor-car than a power unit which derived its energy from gas produced from benzine. Before a self-propelled road vehicle could be constructed, he had to devise some means of conveying his gas plant on the vehicle; admittedly, this was a comparatively minor problem, but he also had to think out a method of attaching the power unit to the carriage and then to transmit the power produced to the road wheels. He knew that a slow-running gas engine producing very little power would need Nome variation in the gear-ratio whatever type of transmission might be adopted and that to couple his connecting rods direct to one or more of the road wheels would be thoroughly unscientific; a means of providing a free-running engine would be necessary, so that if the vehicle halted the engine would not stop running; he would need some form of steering gear, a means of controlling both the speed of the vehicle and the r.p.m. of the engine.

There was no precedent to give him the slightest indication of how all these and many other problems should be solved; he did not know whether he should provide for three wheels or four; whether the driving power should be taken by all the wheels or one of them, and if three, whether it should have two in front and one behind or vice versa; whether his frame should be made of wood or metal, or what form his road wheels should take. If these problems are coupled to the fact that he had little or no money with which to begin his experiments and that there were no more than a handful of people in the world who had any faith in the future of the automobile, we can form some hazy idea of the courage and determination necessary to undertake this huge task.

The modern motorist now enjoying the fruits of Benz’ early work would do well to ask himself how he would start to build a motor-car if he had never seen a motor vehicle of any kind in his life, and the only thing he had as a guide was a stationary gas engine.

But Karl Benz, the son of an engine-driver and the grandson of a blacksmith, solved all these problems, and by so doing laid the foundation-stone of what is one of the greatest industries in the world. A man of his engineering attainments deserves better at the hands of those of us who enjoy the fruits of his invention, and his name should be as world famed and as honoured as are the names of the other three inventors mentioned.

The word inventor, however, is capable of more than one interpretation; one school of thought would be justified in disclaiming Benz as the inventor of the automobile, for he was not the first man either to invent or drive a horseless vehicle on the roads. At the end of the eighteenth century Murdock constructed a mechanically-propelled vehicle, to say nothing of Richard Trevithick (1801); Andrews (1826); Nasmyth (1827); Harland (1827); Heaton (1833); Summers and Ogle (1831); Sir Goldsworthy Gurney (1826); Hancock (1827); Colonel Maceroni (1834); Roberts (1833), all of whom experimented with the horseless road vehicle propelled by steam.

The actual discovery of the four-stroke principle of working was by a French engineer named Beau de Rochas, who held a patent for it, but he was born before the time his invention was fully appreciated. No engines were made by him and his patent was allowed to lapse for want of support. The only reward he obtained was a charitable pension of 500 francs from a Parisian scientific society.

It is a moot point whether the first vehicle propelled by an intemal-combustion engine was designed by the Frenchman, Etienne Lenoir, or the Austrian, Siegfried Markus. Some litigation took place in France between the French holders of the Otto four-stroke gas-engine patents and Lenoir, in which it was contended that de Rochas had anticipated Otto ; the action was won by Lenoir, which gave the right to all other gas-engine manufacturers to adopt de Rochas’ principle, as his patent had then expired. Siegfried Markus constructed two such vehicles, one of which was exhibited at the Vienna Exhibition in 1873, and this very machine is still in the possession of the Austrian Automobile Club, which holds Markus to be the inventor of the motor-car.

Nevertheless, careful research does not establish the fact that there was any link between the wholly unsuccessful experiments of Lenoir and Markus, who abandoned the task, and the designing and construction of the motor vehicle by Karl Benz.

There is no indication that Benz even so much as saw the product of his predecessors’ brains, and what he produced was so totally dissimilar from all previous attempts that it calls for much imagination to suggest that the one was but the development of the other.

But from the early experiments of Lenoir and Markus nothing developed. These engineers had endeavoured, by means of the internal-combustion engine, to solve an agelong problem, but by reason of crudeness of design, discouragement or otherwise, they abandoned the task, which remained unsolved until Benz took in hand the problem once more and approached it from a different angle. From the moment of his first vehicle taking the roads, the motor industry of the world began. Daimler was similarly occupied, and so the fever to produce a practical horseless carriage rapidly spread; but it was Benz who began the movement. To deprive him of the laurel wreath of inventorship would be to open up again the old problem of whether John Boyd Dunlop—a Belfast veterinary surgeon—was the inventor of the pneumatic tyre, for he was not the first man to produce one. Robert W. Thomson was granted such a patent in June 1845, but as Thomson’s tyre was completely unsuccessful and his invention forgotten when Dunlop began his experiments, it would surely be equally futile to challenge Dunlop’s claim to be the inventor of the pneumatic tyre as it would be to question whether Benz invented the automobile.

From both a common-sense and commercial point of view, an inventor is not a person who invents, fails, disappears and is forgotten, but one who produces something, develops it, and in the course of time turns it to the purpose intended.

If, however, Benz cannot claim to be the inventor of the automobile, by reason of the fact that others were before him, then we are no less justified in questioning the claims of his predecessors, for they would not have been able to accomplish the little they did if the nut and bolt had never been invented, or if somebody had not thought of the common wheel, and so we should soon find ourselves exploring a period in the world’s history some thousands of years before Christ, for the one is nothing more than a development of the other.

But even if we discount all efforts prior to Benz to construct a horseless vehicle propelled by an internal-combustion engine, there is still a third school of thought which questions whether Gottlieb Daimler is not the rightful owner of the title.

Chapter VI gives some details of Daimler’s early life, his subsequent engineering career and his experiments. The important role he played in the formation of the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft and how he died when the motor industry of the world was in its cradle are matters of motoring history. It is indisputable that no man threw his whole life more thoroughly into the cause of automobilism than did Daimler and at a time when the horseless vehicle was little