Bertha Benz drove 106 km without permission in 1888

5 August 1888, Mannheim. Bertha Ringer, married Benz, loaded her two teenage sons, Eugen and Richard, onto the Patent-Motorwagen number 3, the heavy single-cylinder tricycle her husband Carl had built. She left at five in the morning without telling him. She was going to her mother's house in Pforzheim, 106 kilometres south, and she wanted to prove that the contraption could actually be used to travel from one place to another.

The carburettor ran out of ligroin in Wiesloch: she stopped at the Stadt-Apotheke, the village pharmacy, and they sold her three litres as a stain remover. Today it is regarded as the first filling station in the world. Along the way, Bertha soldered the accelerator cable with a hat garter, cleared a blocked pipe with her hairpin, and asked the blacksmith in Bruchsal to fit a leather lining to the wooden brake, which was already smoking on the downhills.

She reached Pforzheim at dusk and sent Carl a telegram to tell him. The next day the German press put the car on the front page; orders started within a week. Carl had always demonstrated the engine inside his courtyard; nobody bought what they had not seen rolling down the street.