Siegfried Marcus’ first motorcar circa 1870
With something as evolutionary as the automobile, it might be a fool’s errand to try and determine just who “invented” the car as we know it. Should we date and credit the automobile to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s fardier à vapeur steam wagon of 1770, or should the timeline start with something more practical, more similar to the modern automobile? You have to start somewhere and most modern histories of the car credit Gotlieb Daimler and Carl Benz as being the auto’s inventors, with Benz’s Patent Motor Wagen usually cited as the first automobile, though as we shall see, that wasn’t always the case. Benz’s three-wheeler is considered to be so historically significant that even the replica Patent Wagens made by John Bentley Engineering in the UK from 1986-97 now fetch high five-figure prices at auction and many are in the collections of some of the finest automotive museums in the world including Mercedes-Benz’s own museum. It’s true that the Benz trike was the first practical automobile, and certainly the first that went into production and was sold, but while Benz and Daimler’s achievements were indisputable, it’s likely that the honor of being considered the automobile’s inventor was given to those German engineers after being stolen by the Nazis from Siegfried Marcus, a Jewish engineer and prolific inventor who lived and worked in Vienna.
Siegfried Samuel Marcus 1831 – 1898
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When he’s not busy doing custom machine embroidery at Autothreads Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth and contributes to The Truth About Cars and Left Lane News
A historical aside:
The Cugnot vehicle was a steam-powered truck originally intended for military transport. Unfortunately, the thing was huge and massive, and nobody had thought about providing any kind of brakes. For that reason, it ended up in the first known motor vehicle accident, in which it demolished a garden wall.
The Nazis, like all totalitarian ideologies, were adept at this sort of thing. We see it today in the “revisionism” of the modern Left. For persons of this ilk history is a battlefield to be fought over and won. (See anything by Howard Zinn.) I can see where the unassailably Teutonic Benz and Daimler would have been far preferable to the Nazi mind-set as the inventors of the “horseless carriage” than Sigfried Marcus. Still, the automobile was not so much an invention as the final assemblage of a number of separate technologies that “jelled” at a particular moment in history. Marcus himself may not have been the “inventor” of the autombile but he should receive credit.
As a journalist and author who has written extensively about the Third Reich, I found your post on Siegried Marcus, a little known victim of Nazi ideology, particularly compelling.
One minor correction of a typo in the text: Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 was known as the Anschluss, not the Auschluss, as you wrote.
Great piece!
Frank Sanello