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| Bertha and Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler Portrait : New Indian Express |
James
Watt watched a tea kettle boil, and built a steam engine. This is what we read
in school. But England imported tea from China; the Chinese have boiled tea for a
thousand years before the English. Why didn’t some Chinese James Watt invent
the steam engine?
Karl
Benz built the first petrol engine car in Germany, a hundred years after Watt. Nobody
boils tea in petrol, so what inspired Karl Benz?
From Steam to Petrol
James
Watt’s steam engine, was NOT inspired by a tea kettle, but by earlier steam
engines by Thomas Savery and William Newcomen. But theirs were inefficient
engines – Watt’s major breakthrough took twenty years of hard work and several
incremental improvements, mainly in measuring devices. His crucial breakthrough was
an external condenser. Watt’s stationary engine, powered cotton mills and
mechanical presses in the 1780s. The railway steam engine, was invented forty years later by Richard Trevithick
and George Stephenson in the 1820s. In the intervening period, scientists discovered
several laws of heat and power – the
field of thermodynamics. Petroleum was discovered only in the 1850s. But it was
primarily used for lighting lamps or stoves.
But some
tinkering engineers saw great potential in petrol, as a substitute for steam
engines. Coal was hard to mine, slow to ignite, difficult and dirty to handle
and caused a lot of smoke and grime; petrol on the other hand, flowed from oil
wells, could be stored in tanks, flowed through pipes and had a much lower
ignition point.
The
Engine
The
petrol engine was invented by Nikolaus Otto, a travelling salesman for a food
company! He had been inspired by an engine designed by Lenoir that ran on coal
gas; Otto experimented with a copy of a Lenoir engine that another skilled mechanic
built for him in 1861. He created an engine fueled with an alcohol air mixture.
Eugen Langen, owner of a sugar refinery, invested in a new company that Otto started, and he built an improved
engine. At the 1867 Paris exhibition, his engine won the first prize. He
expanded this company, reorganized as Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz AG. This was not
a car engine, but more like a mechanical power device for workshops, like
printing presses.
Otto
hired Gottlieb Daimler and William Maybach to improve it; they made it smaller,
quieter, more efficient. But when Daimler proposed fitting Otto’s engine to
power a horseless carriage, Otto showed no interest.
Horseless Carriages
So
Daimler and Maybach quit Otto’s company in 1882, rented a house in Canstatt and
started a car company. Daimler experimented, first fitting a bicycle with a
petrol engine – the world’s first motorbike, called the Motoren Gesselschaft. Daimler’s seventeen year old son Paul test
drove it – the ultimate teenager fantasy!
This public
demonstration provoked amazement and curiosity. But a local newspaper, Canstatt
Zeitung was quite critical, calling it a “repugnant diabolical device,
dangerous to citizens.” Paul test drove the bike at nights, in secret. He even
replaced the front wheel with a skid, and drove it on a frozen lake!
Offended
by media criticism, but not discouraged, Daimler then tested the engine on a
boat. He disguised it with wires to pretend it was electric. After it proved
successful, he revealed he had used a petrol engine!
In 1886,
for his wife Emma’s birthday he ordered a magnificent horse carriage – delivered
secretly at night. He planned to build a car, with that carriage.
Ringing in a New Era
Parallely,
in Mannheim, a nearby city, Karl Benz tried to build a petrol engine. His
earlier business failed. But his wife Bertha had great faith in him and her
dowry was useful for his experiments. After many failures, he successfully ran
a stationary two stroke petrol engine on the last day of 1879. In his own words:
After supper my wife said, “Let
us go over to the shop and try our luck once more.” My heart was pounding. I
turned the crank. The engine started to go “put-put-put”, and the music of the
future sounded with regular rhythm. We both listened to it run for a full hour,
fascinated, never tiring of the single tone of its song. The longer it played
its note, the more sorrow and anxiety it conjured away from the heart. Suddenly
the bells began to ring – New Years Eve bells. We felt they were not just
ringing in a new year, but a new era.
He
mounted his engine on a three wheel carriage, calling it the Benz Patent
Motorwagen. The local newspaper Mannheimer Zeitung attacked Benz’s idea calling
it, “useless, ridiculous, indecent. Who would buy it when there are horses for
sale?” But in 1885 he drove the Motorwagen on the streets and it became a
sensation! But not many people actually bought his Motorwagen.
Bertha’s Benzene Yatra
Bertha,
Karl’s wife is the great romantic heroine of what followed. In August 1888, one
morning, she asked her fifteen year old son Eugen “Can you drive it?”
The right
answer was “No, mother, my Dad put an engine with a steering rod on a horse
carriage. Nobody knows how to drive it.”
But Eugen said, “Of course!”
With
Eugen’s brother Richard, the family drove to visit Bertha’s family in
Pforzheim. There were no petrol bunks then. So they refueled with benzene, sold
at apothecaries (pharmacies!). Bertha fixed a short circuit in the engine, with
her hairpin. Eugen repaired the chains when they slipped. Karl was annoyed, but
when Germans realized that a mother and children could safely drive a car a
hundred km, they became national celebrities. Bertha’s drive is as famous in
Germany as Gandhi’s Dandi yatra is in India.
Teenage
drivers, dowry money, media critics, a daring cross country journey, ushering
in a new era – sounds like a mega serial, but this is real history!
Shoulders of Giants
Darwin
and Wallace, independently discovered evolution while living on different
continents; Wallace’s letter to Darwin forced the latter to publish; after this
they became friends and mutual admirers. Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler
independently invented the petrol based car, but never met each other, even
though they lived in the same country! Oddly, several years after Daimler died,
the companies they started would merge as Daimler-Benz.
But they
shared history, by standing on the shoulders of giants who came before them.
Otto’s engine, was inspired by Lenoir, who
was inspired by James Watt, who was inspired by Newcomen and Savery!
Note Today, March 17 is Gottlieb Daimler's birthday. This essay was originally published in New Indian Express under the title Changing History's Gears as part of a series about scientists.
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The Art and Aesthetic of Driving
Emile Levassor - architect of the car
