1. Bertha Benz was the business partner, investor and wife of automobile inventor Carl Benz.
23 Facts About Bertha Benz
2.
Bertha Benz was not allowed to study in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and her financial and practical engineering contributions have long been overlooked until the 21st century.
3.
Cacilie Bertha Benz Ringer was born on 3 May 1849 to a wealthy carpenter family in Pforzheim.
4.
Bertha Benz's father became wealthy by speculating with real estate.
5.
Bertha Benz attended a boarding school in Pforzheim for 10 years and was known for her ambition and fascination with technological innovation, but could not pursue higher education, as women were not allowed to attend university at the time.
6.
On 27 June 1869, during an excursion by the Eintracht Club, she met and fell in love with machine lover and tinkerer Carl Bertha Benz, who was five years her senior and penniless, but had a head full of crazy ideas, and who could talk better about technology than about feelings.
7.
On 3 July 1886, Karl Bertha Benz presented the Patent-Motorwagen automobile to the public in Mannheim.
8.
Karl Bertha Benz was a poor marketer and faced competition by Gottlieb Daimler, which prompted his wife to undertake the test drive in 1888.
9.
On 5 August 1888,39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance.
10.
Bertha Benz left Mannheim around dawn, solving numerous problems along the way.
11.
Bertha Benz cleaned a blocked fuel line with her hat pin and used her garter as insulation material.
12.
Bertha Benz reached Pforzheim somewhat after dusk, notifying her husband of her successful journey by telegram.
13.
The trip was officially forbidden and Bertha Benz risked a penalty.
14.
Bertha Benz reported everything that had happened along the way and made important suggestions, such as the introduction of an additional gear for climbing hills and brake linings to improve brake-power.
15.
Bertha Benz's trip demonstrated to the burgeoning automotive industry that test drives were essential to their business.
16.
Karl Bertha Benz died in 1929 with the beginning of the Great Depression.
17.
Bertha Benz's fortunes had shrunk due to World War I and hyperinflation, but it did not seem to bother her, as she was accustomed to living modestly to the point of miserliness all her life.
18.
In 1933,84-year-old Bertha Benz is said to have greeted Adolf Hitler as the "savior of Germans".
19.
Bertha Benz later distanced herself from Hitler when she understood that his policies were leading to a new war.
20.
Karl Bertha Benz is described by contemporary witnesses as a "serious and just person", while his wife is said to have had an "aggressive nature".
21.
Bertha Benz died at age 95 in her village in Ladenburg on 5 May 1944.
22.
The Bertha Benz Challenge, embedded in the framework of the ceremony of Automobile Summer 2011, the big official German event and birthday party commemorating the invention of the automobile by Carl Benz over 137 years ago, took place on Bertha Benz Memorial Route on 10 and 11 September 2011.
23.
The Bertha Benz home has been designated as historic and is used as a scientific meeting facility for a nonprofit foundation, the Daimler and Bertha Benz Foundation, which aims to promote science and research in order to gain a better understanding of the correlation between man, the environment and technology.