The Journey

    The first motorcar was built by Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in 1886. No one believed in their product and soon they started to lose hope in it as well. Enter Bertha Benz.

    Born in Germany on May 3, 1849, Bertha became very interested in technical matters at a young age.  This caught the attention of a young inventor and entrepreneur by the name of Karl Benz and the two were married in 1869. She invested her whole dowry into her husband's company, and after decades of work, a patent for the motorcar was registered on January 29, 1886. When the world ignored Benz's work, Bertha took matters into her own hands.

   Bertha, along with her two sons Richard and Eugen, took a secret road trip to her parent's house around 65 miles away. The trip was so secret that even Karl didn't know what Bertha was planning. Bertha drove on roads meant for horse drawn wagons and weren't suitable for automobile use. The rough terrain caused many problems with the car, including clogged valves and wires close to being unusable. Bertha pushed through every problem with ingenuity and perseverance. She bought alcohol from pharmacists along the way to use as fuel and used leather to make disk brakes for the car. Of course, the people of the towns and villages she passed through thought she was a witch. This made it much harder to find parts to fix and improve the machine.
    The journey ended with the car being pushed over the last hill as it had run out of fuel. The trip allowed the automobile to become more popular. Also, the journey was taken in a time when women were thought to be inferior. They weren't even allowed to get higher education because "their brains were too light to absorb as much information as men". The journey proved that women were smarter than the people of that time period thought and thus helped women be treated more equally.
    Imagine what the present would look like if Bertha hadn't taken matters into her own hands. We would still be moving about in horse drawn carriages and the automobile would be a dot in history.