Carl Benz

Carl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant on 25 November 1844 in Mühlburg, Grand-Duchy of Baden, today a part of Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. His presumed birth house is remembered with a memorial at Rheinstraße 22, although the original building was demolished in the 1950s to make way for additional car lanes. He was the "illegitimate" child of Josephine Vaillant and Johann Georg Benz, a locomotive driver, whom she married a few months later. According to German law, the child acquired the name "Benz" by legal marriage of his parents. When he was two years old, his father died of pneumonia, and his name was changed to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father. The Benz family was Lutheran in faith.

Despite living in near poverty, his mother strove to give him a good education. Benz attended the local school in Karlsruhe and was a prodigious student. In 1853, at the age of nine, he started at the scientifically oriented Lyceum. After he graduated, he studied at Karlsruhe's polytechnical school under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher.

Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but he eventually followed his father's steps toward locomotive engineering. On 30 September 1860, at age 15, he passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering for the Karlsruhe polytechnical school, which he subsequently attended. Benz graduated on 9 July 1864, aged 19.

Following his formal education, Benz had seven years of professional training in several companies, but did not fit well in any of them. The training started in Karlsruhe with two years of varied jobs in a mechanical engineering company.

He then moved to Mannheim to work as a draftsman and designer in a scales factory. In 1868, he went to Pforzheim to work for the bridge building company Gebrüder Benckiser Eisenwerke und Maschinenfabrik. He later went to Vienna for a short period to work at an iron construction company.