Benz's lifelong hobby brought him to a bicycle repair shop in Mannheim owned by Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm E?linger. In 1883, the three founded 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 began to produce gas engines as well. The success of the company gave Benz the opportunity to indulge in his old passion of designing a horseless carriage. Based on his experience with, and fondness for, bicycles, he used similar technology when he created an automobile. It featured wire wheels (unlike carriages' wooden ones) [7] with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition [8] and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator.[8] Power was transmitted by means of two roller chains to the rear axle. Karl Benz finished his creation in 1885 and named it the Benz Patent Motorwagon. It was the first automobile entirely designed as such to generate its own power, not simply a motorized stage coach or horse carriage, which is why Karl Benz was granted his patent and is regarded as its inventor. The Motorwagon was patented on January 29, 1886 as DRP-37435: "automobile fueled by gas". [9] The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. The next year Benz created the Motorwagon Model 2 which had several modifications, and in 1887, the definitive Model 3 with wooden wheels was introduced, showing at the Paris Expo the same year.[8] Benz began to sell the vehicle (advertising it as the Benz Patent Motorwagen) in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history. The second customer of the Motorwagon was a Parisian bicycle manufacturer [8] Emile Roger who had already been building Benz engines under license from Karl Benz for several years. Roger added the Benz automobiles (many built in France) to the line he carried in Paris and initially most were sold t here. Early customers could only buy gasoline from pharmacies that sold small quantities as a cleaning product. The early-1888 version of the Motorwagon had no gears and could not climb hills unaided. This limitation was rectified after Bertha Benz made her famous trip driving one of the vehicles a great distance and suggested to her husband the addition of another gear. The popular story about this first long distance automobile trip is that, supposedly without the knowledge of her husband, on the morning of August 5, 1888, Bertha Benz took this vehicle on a 106 km (65 mile) trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother, taking her sons Eugen and Richard with her. In addition to having to locate fuel at pharmacies on the way, she also overcame various technical and mechanical problems and finally arrived at nightfall, announcing the achievement to Karl by telegram. It had been her intention to demonstrate the feasibility of using her husband's invention for travel and to obtain publicity that would make more people aware of it. Today the event is celebrated every two years in Germany with an antique automobile rally. In 2008 Bertha Benz Memorial Route[10] was officially approved as a route of industrial heritage of mankind, because it follows Bertha Benz's tracks of the world's first long-distance journey by automobile in 1888. Now everybody can follow the 194 km of signposted route from Mannheim via Heidelberg to Pforzheim (Black Forest) and back.

A two-stage rocket is more than twice as complex, with many failure modes, so I keep an eye out for these ones. This was a “heads up” flight as announced by the LCO. The upper stage needs to be ignited at the proper moment by the on-board computer. It’s a nail biting moment as the crowd looks overhead and sees the booster fall away, chanting light, light….long pause…oh no… it’s slowing down and arching over… “don’t light; don’t light”… a sophisticated flight computer won’t make that mistake, and so we just have a heavy lawn dart coming in overhead. But meanwhile, a separate problem has happened with the booster – it is also coming in hot, but is not as heavy since the propellant has burned. Visually, I really liked the car tracks leading off to the distant hills, peacefully shimmering in the morning mirage.