Happy 140th Birthday To The Automobile

Mercedes-Benz just revealed the facelifted S-Class at a giant party at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, attended by our very own Andy Kalmowitz. Even though the updated S-Class is apparently the biggest facelift in the company's history, with more than 2,700 new components, it's still a bit unusual that such a huge bash would be thrown for a simple mid-cycle refresh. That's because it's not just a party for the S-Class, but for the automaker and the automobile as a whole.

140 years ago today, on January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for a vehicle he had started work on the previous year. The three-wheeled two-seater was powered by a rear-mounted single-cylinder four-stroke gasoline engine, with an output of three-quarters of a horsepower. Patent number 37435 was granted (below is an original copy of the document from the Mercedes archives), now widely regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile, and it's part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. So everyone raise your champagne glasses and give a toast to the car for its 140th birthday.

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen made its first public outing in the summer of 1886, but by far its most important journey came two years later in August 1888 when Benz's wife Bertha took one of the cars on the first long-distance journey in automotive history. With her two sons as passengers, Bertha drove the car more than 111 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim with some detours in between,including making repairs with a hat pin and a garter. This proved the automobile's feasibility in the real world — without Bertha, none of us would be here.

During the production run, Benz made improvements to the car, including fitting it with a fuel tank and upping output to 2 hp, which raised the top speed to 10 mph. It's said that around 25 of the original Patent-Motorwagen were built between 1886 and 1893, but none survive today. In 2001, Mercedes-Benz Classic created a run of exact replicas that it actually sold to people, shown at the top of the story.

Also in 1886, about 60 miles away from Mr. Benz, Gottlieb Daimler created the first four-wheeled automobile when he fitted a carriage with a combustion engine he had developed with Wilhelm Maybach. The two never worked together or even personally met, but forty years later, Benz & Cie. and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft merged to form Daimler-Benz AG, and the Mercedes-Benz brand as we know it was born.