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Bertha Benz - Automotive Pioneer
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To prove to the world that her husband’s invention was the future of mobility, Bertha Benz went on the first long-distance journey with an automobile on 5 Aug 1888.

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Bertha Benz was a German automotive pioneer.  She was the business partner and wife of automobile inventor Karl Benz.  On 5 August 1888, she was the first person to drive an automobile over a long distance.  In doing so, she brought the Benz Patent-Motorwagen worldwide attention and got the company its first sales.  On 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance, though illegally.  Before this historic trip, motorized drives were merely very short trials, returning to the point of origin, made with assistance of mechanics.  Following wagon tracks, this pioneering tour covered a one-way distance of about 106 km (66 mi).  Although the ostensible purpose of the trip was to visit her mother, Bertha Benz had other motives — to prove to her husband, who had failed to adequately consider marketing his invention, that the automobile in which they both had heavily invested would become a financial success once it was shown to be useful to the general public; and to give her husband the confidence that his constructions had a future.  She left Mannheim around dawn, solving numerous problems along the way.  Bertha demonstrated her significant technical capabilities on this journey.  With no fuel tank and only a 4.5-litre supply of petrol in the carburetor, she had to find ligroin, the petroleum solvent needed for the car to run.  It was only available at apothecary shops, so she stopped in Wiesloch at the city pharmacy to purchase the fuel.  At the time, petrol and other fuels could only be bought from chemists, and so this is how the chemist in Wiesloch became the first fuel station in the world.  She cleaned a blocked fuel line with her hat pin and used her garter as insulation material.
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