Emil Jellineck with his daughter Mercédès c1885.
The Best or Nothing: Mercedes-Benz
To many of us, Mercedes-Benz is a name synonymous with luxurious and cutting-edge automobiles. However, ‘Mercedes’ the brand was in fact inspired by a 12-year old girl. Credited as the inventor of the automobile, engineer Karl Benz (of Benz & Co) patented the three-wheeled motor car known as the ‘Motorwagen’ way back in 1886. Less than a decade later, Benz introduced the Velocipede (Velo), which became the first large-scale production automobile and saw Benz & Co become the second-largest engine manufacturer in Germany. Around the same time, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach were developing the bicycle-inspired Daimler Reitwagen (Riding Car), the world’s first motorcycle with a single-cylinder internal combustion engine. In 1889, they built their first automobile and created the Daimler-MotorenGesellschaft (DMG) business the very next year, successfully producing a number of race cars built on contract for Emil Jellinek. This in turn leads us on to that 12-year old girl. Emil Jellinek was a European entrepreneur who established an automobile trading company in the late 1890s while working as Austria’s Consul General in Nice, France. He sold multiple car brands, including those of DaimlerMotoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) to French aristocrats and went on to sell them globally to the likes of the Rothschild family. Emil believed that the name Mercedes (meaning kindness or mercy in Spanish) brought good fortune. He not only called his daughter Mercedes and labelled his family’s residence Villa Mercedes, but even raced under the pseudonym of ‘Monsieur Mercedes’ too. So it was no surprise that 12-year-old Mercédès Jellinek provided the inspiration for the 1901 Mercedes 35 HP, the first model of many to come to adopt the moniker. Webb's
December
Inventor Karl Benz sitting The Benz Motorwagen, the world’s first automobile, c1886.
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