January 29 1886 – 23 Shevat 5642
Carl Benz registered a patent on the first automobile, which was in fact a tricycle with an internal combustion engine. Carl’s wife Bertha took the car out for a drive in 1888 without her husband’s knowledge, covering over 196 kilometers in the first long distance car journey. She fixed engine problems with her hat pin during the journey, and filled up the engine with alcohol purchased at a pharmacy on the way, which consequently became the first filling station in history. Emil Jellinek, a rich businessman with an interest in car racing and the son of a rabbi, gave Benz’s cars their hall-mark name when he purchased a fleet of cars from Daimler motors and made the deal conditional on the automobile model concerned being named for his daughter, Mercedes. When Daimler Motors merged with Benz in 1926, the company became Mercedes-Benz. Who today remembers that the world’s most prestigious cars are named after a Jewish girl?