The Mercedes Touch

How many times will car enthousiasts, while walking around some international car show or the local dealer’s showroom, get updates online or devour the latest car magazine, be aware of the days that cars didn’t drive around in public yet, but only existed in the minds of some visionary men? And as always when those visionary men are involved, how close to total failure they had come, before they got something running that we would recognize as a car? What is the story behind all those shiny body-works, roaring power under the hood and fancy names?

One of the most likely mentioned names in the entire world, if asked one, must be mercedes benz. And with reason. It’s one of the world’s oldest, if not the oldest, automobiles, and from those early days on have kept their reputation of being reliable and innovative. What striked me was to find out a few facts. Among them the perhaps most known one: that Mercedes (Spanish for gifts or favors) was nothing more than the daughter’s name of Austrian entrepreneur, racer and member of the Daimler-Mercedes-Maybach board Emil Jellinek. Less known: the ever present star, the trademark of Mercedes, was a sketch on a postcard by Gottlieb Daimler, and introduced by his sons in 1910 to remember him.

The less used name related to Mercedes, but ‘cranked up heart’ of the car was Karl Friedrich Benz (1844-1929), German engine and automobile engineer. His inventions such as; speed regulation system, ignition, spark plug, carburetor, clutch, gear shift and the water radiator would become the production standard for the car industry. Benz also made use of bicycles’ wire wheels in stead of the wooden ones used for carriages. It was the first real car designed as such to generate its own power, not simply a horse carriage with an engine. To give one more person the share of the wheel that she deserves: Benz needed his wife’s unautherized touch on a trip with the ‘1888 Motorwagen’ that had no gears and could not climb hills unaided, to get him aware of this problem and to solve it. It all rounded up and really got on the move on June 28, 1926, after a long engagement, when Benz & Cie. and DMG finally merged as the Daimler-Benz company, labelling all of its automobiles ‘Mercedes Benz’. Image by Photobucket/misslin55