The Almanac of Collapsing Records

Bertha's Long Drive — Mannheim, 1888

The village road between Mannheim and Pforzheim, in the Grand Duchy of Baden

August 1888 — a summer dawn on a rutted post road in southern Germany, the age of the horse still absolute, a woman and two boys driving a three-wheeled motor carriage more than sixty miles without permission and without an escort

A vehicle came up the road and nothing was pulling it. This breach reads the VILLAGER AT THE ROADSIDE on the Mannheim–Pforzheim post road in August 1888: an ordinary summer morning of dust and carts, and into it a three-wheeled motor carriage carrying a woman and two half-grown boys, sixty-odd miles on its own power, the first long-distance automobile journey ever made. The witness is read only at the verge and the passing: the century of horses held quietly in the background, never argued, the moment itself pure astonishment at a thing arriving before anyone had a name for it. The fragment is the subject's own: the first time the world showed them something it had no word for — and the memory beneath it of a day the ordinary road they walked every morning turned out to lead somewhere nobody had told them about.

From the record

in August 1888 Bertha Benz drove a Benz Patent-Motorwagen from Mannheim toward Pforzheim, a distance of roughly one hundred kilometres, taking her two teenage sons with her and leaving without telling her husband
the machine was a three-wheeled motor carriage steered by a tiller, with a single-cylinder engine and a top speed of about sixteen kilometres per hour
it burned ligroin, a cleaning solvent sold in pharmacies; she bought fuel at the town apothecary in Wiesloch along the way
the vehicle had no fuel gauge and no gearing for steep grades, so the boys got out and pushed the machine up the hills
she cleared a blocked fuel line with her hatpin and insulated a wire with a garter from her stocking; a village cobbler renailed leather to a worn brake block
the journey was made in daylight over ordinary post roads, in view of villagers, farmers and carters who had never seen a vehicle move without an animal

The era door

a plank door in a whitewashed farm wall, the wood silvered by weather, an iron latch cold with dew

MANNHEIM ROAD — AUGUST 1888

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037