The Woman Who Stole the Car

On 5 August 1888, before dawn, Bertha Benz left her husband Carl a note on the kitchen table saying she was taking the boys to visit Grandma in Pforzheim. She did not mention the contraption in the workshop. Carl had spent years building it, doubting it, refusing to sell it. He had received what is considered the world's first driver's license four days earlier. Bertha had no license at all.

She and her sons pushed the Patent-Motorwagen down the back alley by hand so the engine wouldn't wake him.

Then she fired the flywheel and drove 106 kilometres across Baden in a long dress with two teenagers. When the fuel line clogged, she cleaned it with a hat pin. When an ignition wire frayed, she unhooked a garter and wrapped it around the wire. In Wiesloch she walked into the Stadt-Apotheke and demanded the pharmacist's entire stock of ligroin; he tried to talk her down to one litre, for the stains on her dress. In Bauschlott, on a hill the engine couldn't climb, a cobbler named Karl Bitsch nailed leather strips to the wooden brake blocks. That is how brake pads were invented. By a woman who needed to stop.

She wired Carl from her mother's house. They were alive. Build a lower gear.