Karl Benz's lifelong hobby had brought him…

Karl Benz's lifelong hobby had brought him to a bicycle repair shop in Mannheim owned by Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Eßlinger.

In 1883, the three establish a new company producing industrial machines: Benz & Company Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik, usually referred to as, Benz & Cie.

Quickly growing to twenty-five employees, it soon begins to produce static gas engines as well.

Karl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant, in Karlsruhe, Baden, which is part of modern Germany, to Josephine Vaillant and a locomotive driver, Johann George Benz, whom she married a few months later

When he was two years old, his father was killed in a railway accident, and his name was changed to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father.

Despite living in near poverty, his mother strove to give him a good education.

Benz had attended the local Grammar School in Karlsruhe, where he had been a prodigious student.

In 1853, at the age of nine, he had started at the scientifically oriented Lyceum, thenhe studied at the Poly-Technical University under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher.

Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but had eventually followed his father's steps toward locomotive engineering.

On September 30, 1860, at age fifteen, he had passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, which he subsequently attended, graduating on July 9, 1864 at nineteen.

During these years, while riding his bicycle, he had started to envision concepts for a vehicle that would eventually become the horseless carriage.

Following his formal education, Benz had seven years of professional training in several companies, but did not fit well in any of them.

The training started in Karlsruhe with two years of varied jobs in a mechanical engineering company.

He then moved to Mannheim to work as a draftsman and designer in a scales factory.

In 1868, he had gone to Pforzheim to work for a bridge building company Gebrüder Benckiser Eisenwerke und Maschinenfabrik.

Finally, he had gone to Vienna for a short period to work at an iron construction company.

In 1871, at the age of twenty-seven, Karl Benz had joined August Ritter in launching the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop in Mannheim, later renamed Factory for Machines for Sheet-metal Working.

The enterprise's first year went very badly.

Ritter turned out to be unreliable, and the business's tools were impounded.

The difficulty was overcome when Benz's fiancée, Bertha Ringer, bought out Ritter's share in the company using her dowry.

On July 20, 1872 Karl Benz and Bertha Ringer married; the couple will have five children.

Despite such business misfortunes, Karl Benz leads in the development of new engines in the factory he and his wife own.

To get more revenue, in 1878 he had begun to work on new patents, first concentrating all his efforts on creating a reliable gas two-stroke engine, which he finishes on December 31, 1878, New Year's Eve, and for which he had been granted a patent in 1879.

Benz shows his real genius, however, through his successive inventions registered while designing what will become the production standard for his two-stroke engine.

Benz had soon patented the speed regulation system, the battery-powered ignition, the spark plug, the carburetor, the clutch, the gear shift, and the water radiator.

Problems had arisen again when the banks at Mannheim demanded that Bertha and Karl Benz's enterprise be incorporated due to the high production costs it maintained.

The Benzes were forced to improvise an association with photographer Emil Bühler and his brother (a cheese merchant), in order to get additional bank support.

The company became the joint-stock company Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim in 1882.

After all the necessary incorporation agreements, Benz was unhappy because he was left with merely five percent of the shares and a modest position as director.

Worst of all, his ideas have not been considered when designing new products, so he has withdrawn from that corporation just one year later, in 1883.