Bertha Benz's Hall of Fame ride

Is Bertha Ringer getting a free ride into the Automotive Hall of Fame simply because she married the genius Karl Benz 144 years ago?

Not at all. Bertha Benz earned her place in the Hall with one outrageous act of courage, vision and ingenuity.

Indeed, without this German hausfrau, who knows what course the development of the automobile industry might have taken. Not only did she use her dowry to finance Karl's horseless carriage venture, she taught her husband -- an engineering mastermind but clueless marketer -- how to popularize his invention.

In 1888, at age 39, Bertha and her two teenage sons climbed aboard one of the two Patent-Motorwagen vehicles her husband had assembled and set off on a 66-mile romp from Mannheim to Pforzheim. She didn't bother to tell Karl, though she did leave him a note on the kitchen table

She said she needed the car to visit her mother -- fairly commonplace, you'd think, except for one teensy fact. No one in history had ever gone on a car trip before. Her real motive was to demonstrate to her overcautious spouse that his Motorwagen, the first of which he had built two years before, was ready for prime time.

It was as if the wife of Wilbur or Orville Wright had slipped out of the hut at Kitty Hawk one morning in 1903, climbed into that first aeroplane and flown down the beach without telling the brothers.

"She was frustrated," wrote John Lienhard, author of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, and professor emeritus of mechanical engineering and history at the University of Houston. "Karl, the perfectionist, was trying to get everything just right before he took the next step. Bertha knew perfectly well that we can't perfect a design before we field-test it. And she had more faith in Karl's auto than he did."

Karl had completed two models and was working on a third when Bertha resolved to make her test drive. It was no joy ride. It was an arduous journey during which she proved herself the world's first great road mechanic and improviser. 

When an ignition wire short-circuited, she used her garter as an insulator. A hat pin was needed to clean out a clogged fuel pipe. She convinced a blacksmith along the way to help mend a chain and asked a cobbler to bolster the failing wooden brakes with leather -- the world's first pair of brake pads. 

The Motorwagen had no fuel tank so she had to route her trip through villages with apothecaries, where she bought petroleum-based cleaning fluid and fed it into the carburetor. And she frequently needed to stop to find water to cool the engine. 

From time to time, Bertha and the boys had to push the vehicle up steep inclines, causing Karl to add a low gear to the drivetrain.

The Motorwagen was a light three-wheeled vehicle, powered by a single-cylinder gasoline engine that got about 25 mpg. Bystanders stood slack-jawed as it rattled through the Black Forest.

She covered the distance, now known as the Bertha Benz Memorial Route, in about 12 hours. Her purpose was to draw attention to the invention, which she certainly did. Upon arriving at her mom's house at dusk she sent a telegraph message to Karl to say that she had arrived safely. By that time eyewitness accounts were already being rushed into print in local newspapers. With Bertha providing proof of concept, Karl immediately rushed one of his other models to a scientific exhibit in Munich.

The rest was hysteria. They loved the Motorwagen in Munich and orders began to roll in.

"Karl Benz is often given credit for inventing the automobile," wrote Lienhard.

"Well, no one person invented the automobile. Internal-combustion-driven vehicles preceded Benz. But a good part of the reason he gets the credit was his wife Bertha."

Bertha Benz died in 1944 at age 95, a heroine of the auto industry.