People · 1853–1918
Emil Jellinek.
He never designed anything. He could not read an engineering drawing. He wrote the brief for the first modern motor car, paid for it in advance, named it after his ten-year-old daughter, and made himself so intolerable that the factory eventually paid him to leave.
On 21 March 1899, at the Nice race week, a Daimler was entered in the touring class under the name of a driver who did not exist. The entry read Monsieur Mercédès.
It was the given name of the owner's ten-year-old daughter. Obvious pseudonyms were the convention among gentlemen entrants — Henri de Rothschild raced as Dr. Pascal — and the car won, ahead of two other Daimlers belonging to the same owner's two best customers. It was, as one historian has noted, a triple victory in what amounted to a genteel coffee morning. It also filled the order books, which was the entire point.
Chapter I
The black sheep
Emil Jellinek was born in Leipzig on 6 April 1853, and the family moved to Vienna three years later. His father, Adolf Jellinek, was among the most celebrated Jewish preachers in Central Europe, a scholar of the Zohar who became chief preacher of Vienna. His brother Georg became a great professor of public law at Heidelberg; his brother Max Hermann a professor of German philology. Emil could not sit still in a classroom.
He left the Gymnasium at Sondershausen after a disciplinary case, fled a commercial school in Prague in 1870, and took a job on the railway at Rotkosteletz in Bohemia at seventeen. He was dismissed in 1872 for what the standard German biographical dictionary calls, with audible restraint, various acts of insubordination. The story that he was sacked for organizing illicit night-time train races is the version his son later told, and it may well be true, but no archive confirms it.
His father's connections then put him where a difficult son could do no damage: North Africa. He worked as a commercial agent at Tetuan in Morocco and Oran in Algeria, tried tobacco, married Rachel Goggmann in 1874, and became a vice-consul. He represented a French insurance company in Algiers, moved that business to Vienna in the mid-1880s, and there made a genuine fortune — through favorable contracts and, more to the point, skilful speculation on the exchange.
Chapter II
The best and worst customer
Rachel died in 1893. The family began wintering on the Riviera, and Jellinek found the thing he had been looking for. Nice in the season held the entire moneyed population of Europe and America, physically present, comprehensively bored, for four months a year. He was not going to sell motor cars to the public. He was going to sell them to people he had dinner with.
He tried a De Dion tricycle, a Léon Bollée voiturette, and a Benz Viktoria — the same model Bertha Benz and her husband were photographed in — which he dismissed as a monster crawling like a spider. His first Daimler arrived in October 1897, a six-horsepower belt-driven twin good for twenty-four kilometers an hour. He wanted more of everything immediately. "If I can't get any more out of an automobile than out of a horse and carriage," he said, "then I might as well travel by horse again."
Then he became the correspondent from hell. He changed his shirt three times a day and covered the cuffs with demands, which his secretary transcribed and posted to Wilhelm Maybach in Cannstatt; letters were too slow, so he telegraphed. He complained about gearbox noise, about handling, about delivery dates, in a tone that got steadily ruder. The Mercedes-Benz archive's own summary of him is the most economical judgement anyone has managed: the best, yet also the most difficult customer of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft.
He was also right about the cars. The Daimler Phoenix was nose-heavy, tall and unstable, and on 30 March 1900, on the first bend of the Nice–La Turbie hillclimb, the works driver Wilhelm Bauer lost control of Jellinek's entry against a rock face and died the next day. Gottlieb Daimler himself had died three weeks earlier. The men at Cannstatt blamed Jellinek for demanding so reckless a car; Jellinek blamed the engineers, and then argued the company out of abandoning motorsport altogether: "Victories bring world fame. People buy the winning brand. It would be commercial suicide to abstain from racing. What we need is a new vehicle of completely different design."
Nice, 2 April 1900
A new form of engine is to be produced and the same is to bear the name Daimler-Mercedes.
What Jellinek supplied
The requirement
Long wheelbase, wide track, a low center of gravity, a light and powerful engine, electric ignition, at least thirty-five horsepower, delivery by 15 October. Then the money: an order for thirty-six cars at 550,000 marks a fortnight later, and another thirty-six by June — more than half of the factory's entire previous year's output. Plus exclusive distribution for Austria-Hungary, France, Belgium and the United States, and a promise to get the press of three countries to write about it.
What Maybach supplied
The machine
Everything the car is actually remembered for: the honeycomb radiator that halved the water it carried, mechanically operated inlet valves in place of the old suction type, a pressed-steel frame with the engine bolted straight to it, the scroll clutch, the gate change, and steering pivots recessed into the hubs so the kickback stopped breaking drivers' arms.
The negotiation is preserved as a three-page protocol in the Mercedes-Benz archive, and the sentence above is the one that mattered. Note also the correction it forces: Maybach had begun work on the new engine on 6 February 1900 — seven weeks before Bauer died. The crash sharpened the brief. It did not create it.
Chapter III
The Mercedes era
The car was finished at Cannstatt on 22 November 1900, five weeks late, and shipped to Nice on 22 December. Its racing debut at Pau in February 1901 was a humiliation: the clutch would not hold and the gear lever jammed. Then came Nice week, 25 to 29 March 1901, and everything changed in five days.
Wilhelm Werner won the 392-kilometer race to Salon and back by twenty-one minutes, then the sprint in Nice, then the La Turbie hillclimb — the same hill that had killed Bauer a year before — at a record average. A 35 PS took the world standing-mile record. The tally was four firsts and five seconds. Panhard & Levassor, which had won everything the year before, withdrew its cars before the start.
Paul Meyan, founding member and secretary-general of the Automobile Club de France, wrote the sentence that has followed the marque ever since: "Nous sommes entrés dans l'ère Mercédès." We have entered the Mercedes era. Jellinek's own remark to him, recorded by the archive, is more characteristic: "What you see here is nothing compared to what you will see next year."
In Jellinek's four territories the cars were called Mercedes. Everywhere else they were still sold, for a while, as the New Daimler. The name was registered as a trademark on 23 June 1902 and legally protected that September, and by then the argument was over. He had understood something the engineers had not: "For non-Germans the good old name Daimler was hard to digest. But a name sometimes means everything. It must be easy to pronounce for any tongue, must be catchy and stick in people's mind."
Three cars, three verdicts
1893
Viktoria · Benz Viktoria
Bought in 1893 and rejected out of hand. He called it a monster and compared it to a crawling spider — the beginning of a lifelong habit of telling manufacturers exactly what was wrong with their products.
1899
Phoenix · Daimler Phoenix
Fast, tall and nose-heavy. It won as Monsieur Mercédès in 1899 and killed Wilhelm Bauer at La Turbie in 1900. Jellinek's response was not to change marque but to demand a car built to a different principle.
1901
35 PS · Mercedes 35 PS
His specification, Maybach's engineering, and the first car recognizably modern in layout. Delivered December 1900, victorious at Nice in March 1901, and the origin of the brand name.
Chapter IV
The daughter, and the fall
Mercédès Adrienne Ramona Manuela Jellinek was born in Vienna on 16 September 1889. A birth certificate acquired by the Daimler archive in 2012 settled a long-standing myth: Mercedes was the name on the document, not a pet name her father invented. The same certificate carries the annotation recording that on 24 June 1903 he was authorised to take her name as his own.
He is said to have remarked that this was probably the first time a father had borne the name of his daughter. He signed himself E. J. Mercédès thereafter. He named his villas on the Promenade des Anglais after her, his yacht, his Paris hotel. He hung a large portrait of her at the 1902 Paris exhibition. A sculptor gave her face to the water nymph of a fountain at Baden bei Wien, and later to the mourning woman on the family grave.
She was not interested in cars. Her half-brother Guy said she had their father's temperament, his rages and his hunger for life, "but she was not interested in the automobile at all." Her half-sister remembered her as theatrical, someone who would have loved to be an actress. She married a Viennese baron in 1909, had two children, was ruined by the collapse of Austria-Hungary, left her husband and her children for a sculptor who died of tuberculosis within months, and died of bone cancer in Vienna on 23 February 1929, aged thirty-nine. She never owned a car in her life.
Her father's own fall was slower. The supervisory board minutes from 1902 record directors growing uneasy that he set prices at his own discretion and "in principle bore no risk at all if something went wrong." In 1906 they wrote asking him to send his nephew to the factory instead of coming himself, on the grounds that the nephew had a technical background — a sideswipe at a man who had none. A French sales company was created in 1905 in which he held a minority. He settled with the company in 1908 and left the supervisory board in 1909.
In 1903 they celebrated the prophet. In 1906 they were sick and tired of his prophecies and his reproaches. Peace would only return when the tyrant had gone.
A life
Sixty-four years, of which perhaps nine actually mattered.
1853
Leipzig
Born; the family moves to Vienna in 1856
1872
Dismissed
Sacked from the Bohemian railway
1874
Oran
Commercial agent, vice-consul, married
1897
First Daimler
Six horsepower, belt drive, 24 km/h
1899
Monsieur Mercédès
The pseudonym wins at Nice
1900
La Turbie
Wilhelm Bauer is killed
1900
The protocol
The name Daimler-Mercedes is agreed
1901
Nice week
Four firsts and five seconds
1902
Trademark
Mercedes registered and protected
1903
Jellinek-Mercedes
He takes his daughter's name in law
1909
The exit
Leaves the DMG supervisory board
1918
Geneva
Dies in exile, accused of spying
Epilogue
Two graves
The end was ugly and had nothing to do with cars. Before the war the Austrian authorities came after him for tax on his French property; he transferred the Baden villa to his children and did not go back. Then, in the autumn of 1917, Léon Daudet — France's most notorious antisemitic conspiracy journalist, who ran a wartime campaign alleging German infiltration of French business and who was convicted of defamation in 1920 — accused him in print, without evidence, of spying for the Central Powers.
His French assets were confiscated. His Paris hotel on the Champs-Élysées had already been seized as enemy property in 1915. He fled to Geneva with his family, and died there on 21 January 1918, aged sixty-four. An elderly Austro-Hungarian Jewish businessman with a German-branded fortune had been suspected by France of working for Austria and, simultaneously, by Austria of the reverse.
It went on after him. His son Raoul, persecuted by the Nazis, took his own life at Baden in 1939; his daughter's husband and children were persecuted from 1938, and his grandson was arrested by the Gestapo in occupied France. He lies above the Baie des Anges in the Cimetière du Château at Nice, in a small neo-Gothic chapel that Mercedes-Benz restored in the 1980s. She lies in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, in a family grave that is not an honorary grave, beneath a mourning figure carved with her own face, under a stone that gives her birth year wrongly as 1899.
I don't want a car for today or tomorrow. It will be the car of the day after tomorrow.