People · 1834–1900
Gottlieb Daimler.
He put the high-speed engine on two wheels, four wheels, water and air — and died months before his company built the car that would carry the name Mercedes. His motto is still carved over the workshop door: the best or nothing.
In 1882, the neighbors on Taubenheimstrasse in Cannstatt noticed something wrong at the Daimler villa. Two men were working impossible hours in the garden summer house, behind glass they had covered, making noises nobody could place. Convinced they had found a counterfeiting ring, the neighbors called the police — who got a key from the gardener, raided the workshop while the men were away, and found only engines.
The two men were Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, and what the police walked past was the future: the first engine fast and light enough to move a vehicle. Within four years it had powered the first motorcycle, the first four-wheeled petrol car and the first motorboat. Daimler's ambition was never one machine — it was engines for land, water and air. His company would one day put a three-pointed star on that sentence.
Chapter I
The baker's son and the orphan.
He was born over a bakery in Schorndorf in 1834 and apprenticed as a gunsmith — his journeyman's piece was a pair of engraved double-barrelled pistols. But machines pulled harder than gun barrels. He studied engineering at Stuttgart's Polytechnic, ran a locomotive shop floor at twenty-two, and spent years in France and in England, the motherland of industry, becoming convinced that steam's days were numbered. What the world needed was an engine that was small, fast and cheap.
In 1863, running the machine works of a charitable institution in Reutlingen, he met a gifted fifteen-year-old orphan named Wilhelm Maybach. The partnership that began there lasted the rest of Daimler's life: Daimler the strategist and organizer, Maybach the incomparable designer. Maybach followed him to Karlsruhe, to the Deutz engine works — where Daimler clashed with Nikolaus Otto and left with his compensation in gold marks — and finally, in 1882, to the greenhouse in Cannstatt.
Chapter II
Land, water and air.
The engine the police overlooked ran at 750 revolutions per minute when the best stationary engines of the day managed under two hundred. By 1885 Maybach had refined it into the compact upright single they nicknamed the Standuhr — the Grandfather Clock — and Daimler bolted it into anything that would hold it. First a wooden two-wheeler, the Reitwagen: the world's first motorcycle. Then, in 1886, a carriage — ordered from a coachbuilder as a birthday present for Mrs. Daimler, so nobody would ask why an engineer needed a carriage without horses.
The same engine went into a boat, the Neckar — nervous customers were told the machinery hidden under the ceramic cover was “oil-electrical” — and in 1888 it lifted Wölfert's balloon over the Seelberg. Engines for land, water and air: the phrase became his company's promise, and decades later, the three points of its star.
The business caught up slowly. Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft was founded in 1890 with two financiers, and Daimler — who had watched founders lose their companies to shareholders and dreaded incorporating his own — promptly lived the nightmare: by 1893, threatened with bankruptcy proceedings, he was forced to sell his shares and his patent rights and walk away from the firm carrying his name.
He kept working anyway. In the ballroom of a defunct hotel, he, Maybach and his son Paul built the Phoenix — four cylinders in one block. When a British licensee put money on the table in 1895, he made one condition: Daimler comes back. He did, with shares in hand. The company's engines were winning the first motor races in history; its greatest customer, a flamboyant dealer in Nice named Emil Jellinek, was demanding something faster still.
Carved over the workshop
“Das Beste oder nichts.”
The best or nothing.
The motto
A standard, in stone.
His personal maxim is carved beneath the roof of the Cannstatt garden workshop where the modern engine was born. Mercedes-Benz revived it as the promise of the whole brand.
The star
A postcard, 1872.
Moving to Deutz, he marked his new house on a postcard to his wife with a star: “a star will rise from here and I hope it will bring blessings to us and our children.” His sons remembered — and in 1909 made it the trademark.
He never saw the badge. The star rose anyway.
Chapter III
Eleven days short of the century's car.
His heart had been failing since the early 1890s — a collapse, a cure in Florence, a second marriage that began there. He drove the company hard to the end. On 6 March 1900, at sixty-five, Gottlieb Daimler died in Cannstatt, worn out at the exact moment his industry was being born.
One month later, DMG signed an agreement with Emil Jellinek for a radically new car whose engine, the protocol recorded, “is to bear the name Daimler-Mercedes” — after Jellinek's ten-year-old daughter. Maybach and Paul Daimler delivered it in December; at Nice Week in March 1901 it won nearly everything, and the Automobile Club de France declared that the world had “entered the Mercedes era.”
There is one absence in the story stranger than his early death: Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz — who invented the automobile in the same year, sixty miles apart — never met. Not even in court, when their companies fought over an ignition patent in 1896. The two halves of Mercedes-Benz were joined only in 1926, twenty-six years after Daimler's death.
What he left instead was a bench of people: Maybach, the king of constructors; his son Paul, later DMG's chief engineer; and a company whose engines were already running on land, water and air.
1885
Reitwagen · The first motorcycle
A wooden frame around the Grandfather Clock engine — the first internal-combustion motorcycle. Maybach rode it three kilometers to Untertürkheim at 12 km/h.
1886
Motorkutsche · The first four-wheeler
A carriage ordered as a "birthday gift" for his wife, so the neighbors wouldn’t ask questions — then fitted with an engine. The world’s first four-wheeled petrol automobile.
1901
Mercedes 35 PS · The first modern car
Finished after his death by Maybach and his son Paul, named for a dealer’s daughter — the car that turned his company’s engines into the Mercedes era.
The man who hated the idea of shareholders lost his own company to them in 1893, and had to be bought back into it as a condition of someone else's license deal. Genius organized the engine; it never quite organized the boardroom.
Engines for everything.
Seventeen years from the first high-speed engine to the car that bore another name.
1883
Dream
First high-speed petrol engine
1885
Standuhr
The Grandfather Clock engine
1885
Reitwagen
First motorcycle
1886
Kutsche
First four-wheeled petrol car
1886
Neckar
First motorboat — "oil-electrical"
1888
Balloon
A Daimler engine takes flight
1889
Stahlrad
First ground-up Daimler car
1890
DMG
Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft
1894
Phoenix
Four cylinders, one block
1896
Truck
The first petrol truck
1901
35 PS
Mercedes — after his death
Epilogue
The star rose from there.
He is buried at the Uff-Kirchhof in Bad Cannstatt, a short walk from the villa and the greenhouse — which stands today, preserved, in the Kurpark, with the motto under its roof. In 1929 his oldest friend was laid a few steps away: Wilhelm Maybach, the orphan from Reutlingen who had followed him for forty years.
In 1926 Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft merged with Benz & Cie. to form Daimler-Benz, and the postcard star — registered by his sons in 1909, ringed with laurel and later with a circle — became the badge of Mercedes-Benz. The stadium in Stuttgart carried his name; the trucks still do. Engines for land, water and air: it all happened, just as the man who never saw any of it intended.
“A star will rise from here, and I hope it will bring blessings to us and our children.”