Like many late-20th-century kids reared in the industrial orbit of Detroit, the standard line tossed about by our well-meaning but somewhat uninterested teachers was that ?Henry Ford was the father of the gasoline-powered automobile.? They were wrong of course; Ford was far from first, even in the U.S. If our noble educators had removed their rust-belt blinders even for a minute, they would have made the distinction between popularizing the gasoline-powered automobile and actually being credited with creating it. Because when it comes to claiming the title of first, no other single individual has a stronger case than Karl Benz, whose three-wheeled, self-propelled, gasoline-powered “Patent-Motorwagen” vehicle first rolled under its own power in 1885. Confident he was on to something big, Benz wisely filed for a patent on January 29th of 1886, registering the rig as a ?gas-powered vehicle? with the German Imperial Patent Office in Berlin under the number DRP 37435. Although not uncontested (Gottlieb Daimler, the Duryea brothers, George Selden, and countless others were on similar timelines), the Benz patent remains the closest official date for the birth of the modern automobile. And today marks its 130th birthday.
Benz first showed the vehicle, which for obvious reasons earned the name ?Patentwagen? or ?Patent-Motorwagen? or even simply “patent motor car,” in public on July 3, 1886, when he took it for a spin on the Ringstrasse in Mannheim, Germany. ...