The origins of the Daimler-Benz company founded through a merger in 1926 date back to the mid-1880s, when Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) working with Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929), and Karl Benz (1844-1929) independently invented the internal combustion engine-powered automobile, in southwestern Germany. Although they were merely sixty miles apart, these pioneers were unaware of each other’s early work.
Karl Benz had his shop in Mannheim and invented the world’s first true automobile powered by an internal combustion engine in 1885. It had three wheels. He was granted a patent for his automobile, dated January 29, 1886, for what he called the “Benz Patent Motorwagen”. Among many inventions, Benz patented his first engine in 1879 and included in his ‘integral’ design for the Motorwagen patent application, a high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke engine of his own design.
In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler and design partner Wilhelm Maybach, working in Cannstatt, Stuttgart, were granted a patent dated August 29, 1885 for what is generally recognized as the prototype of the modern gas engine, that they named the “grandfather clock engine”.
On March 8, 1886, Daimler purchased a stagecoach made by Wilhelm Wimpff & Sohn and he and Maybach adapted it to hold this engine, thereby creating a four-wheeled carriage propelled by an engine, as many had before them. The only distinction about this carriage was that it carried an internal combustion engine. None of many similar attempts to adapt carts, boats, or carriages, in many countries, were propelled by this type of engine. On the official history pages of the Mercedes-Benz Internet site it is referred to as “a carriage – without a drawbar but with the conventional drawbar steering. A carriage without horses…” Daimler and Maybach later purposely built, from scratch, the first four-stroke engine powered automobile with four wheels in 1889. They founded DMG in 1890 and sold their first automobile in 1892.
