7 Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler 7potential of the internal-combustion engine. They set up
a shop in Bad Cannstatt and built an air-cooled, one-
cylinder engine in 1885. The first high-speed
internal-combustion engine, it was designed to run at 900
revolutions per minute (rpm). For comparison, Benz’s first
tricycle engine had operated at only 250 rpm. Daimler and
Maybach used one of their early gasoline engines on a
wooden bicycle fitted with an outrigger, which first ran on
Nov. 10, 1885. This may have been the first motorcycle in
the world. The next year the first Daimler four-wheeled
road vehicle was made: a horse-drawn carriage modified to
be driven by a one-cylinder engine.
Daimler appears to have believed that the first phase
of the automobile era would be a mass conversion of
carriages to engine drive; Benz apparently thought of the
motorcar as a separate device. Nevertheless, Daimler
and Maybach’s 1889 car was a departure from previous
practice. Designed from the start as an automobile and
not a carriage, it was based on a framework of light tubing;
it had the engine in the rear; its wheels were driven by a
belt; and it was steered by a tiller. Remarkably, it had four
speeds. This car had obvious commercial value, and in the
following year the Daimler Motoren-Gesellschaft was
founded. The British Daimler automobile was started as a
manufactory licensed by the German company but later
became quite independent of it. (To distinguish machines
made by the two firms in the early years, the German
cars are usually referred to as Cannstatt-Daimlers.) In 1899
the firm built the first Mercedes car. The Daimler and
Benz firms were merged in 1926, and products there-
after have been sold under the name Mercedes-Benz. This
practice continued even during the 1998–2007 merger
with the American firm Chrysler Corporation to form
DaimlerChrysler AG.