Color the Pioneers of the Automobile — The Story of Bertha Benz.
August 5, 1888. She took the car without permission. Nobody had driven 104km before.
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On the morning of August 5, 1888, Bertha Benz left a
note for her husband and drove away in the only automobile that existed. Karl Benz was still asleep. She had told him nothing. She took their two teenage sons, Eugen and Richard, and set off from Mannheim toward Pforzheim — 104 kilometres away — in a machine that had never been driven that far, on roads built for horses, through towns that had never seen a motor vehicle.
Mannheim, 5 August 1888. The first long-distance drive in history.
The machine nobody believed in.
Karl Benz had been granted Patent No.
37435 for the Patent-Motorwagen two years earlier — the first true automobile. But in two years, he had sold almost nothing. The press was skeptical. Investors were cold. Most people who saw it assumed it was a curiosity, not a vehicle. Bertha understood that what it needed was not a better engine. It needed proof. It needed someone to drive it somewhere real.
Patent No. 37435. The first automobile. Two years old and still unproven.
"She used a hairpin to unblock the fuel line. Her garter to insulate a wire. She had the sons push uphill."
104 kilometres.
The journey took the whole day.
The engine overheated. The fuel line clogged — she cleared it with a hairpin. An electrical wire shorted — she wrapped it with her garter. On the steep hills outside Bauschlott, the engine couldn't manage the grade and the boys got out to push. She stopped at a pharmacy in Wiesloch — the first fuel stop in automotive history — and bought ligroin, a cleaning solvent that worked as fuel. She arrived in Pforzheim at dusk and sent Karl a telegram.
The first fuel stop in history — a pharmacy in Wiesloch.
What you'll color.
Bertha Benz set off on a journey that changed how the
world moved. The Patent-Motorwagen in full mechanical detail. The road from Mannheim to Pforzheim. The pharmacy stop at Wiesloch. Karl Benz in his workshop. Period portraits and route maps. Every page drawn from the actual world of 1888 — the clothes, the roads, the machine that started everything.
Karl Benz and the machine he built. His wife proved it worked.
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Unlimited unique coloring pages on your iPad.
The Patent-Motorwagen. Bertha Benz on the road. The stops, the repairs, the farmhouses. Karl Benz in his workshop. Every page drawn from the actual world of the first automobile journey — the machine, the road, the woman who believed in it when almost no one else did.
$19 · $8 · Launch price· One-time · No subscription