A few years ago, one of my students in Germany told me about the alleged story of the origin of the brand with which we are dealing today. According to him, the wife of Karl Benz, the inventor of the car, was Spanish, and their daughter, Mercedes, inspired the name of one of the most prestigious cars in the world. I believed the anecdote and even passed it on to whoever wanted to hear it, but to them I must apologize, for the way this story was told to me, is not completely accurate. There is some truth in it, but as you will see, the details change and we are dealing with two parallel accounts and a third one in the way of an annex, which eventual convergence resulted in the final version.
In any case, the credit for the invention of the automobile goes exclusively to Benz, since he was the first one to build and patent in 1886 a vehicle propelled by an internal combustion engine (also patented by Benz in 1879). This German engineer had had the idea on building a “horseless carriage” when he was a student and had to
Around the same time, two other Germans were starting on their own way to success. Gotlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach founded Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft in 1882 to build engines and, even though they enjoyed some fortune with their four-stroke engine,
Emil Jellinek was one of the five children of a couple of rabbis, the mother Hungarian and the father Czech. Born in Leipzig, Germany, and his family moved to Vienna not long after and it was in this European capital where he would spend his first years. Young Emil was not a very good student. As a matter of fact, he was expelled from several reputed academies, until his father did what was usual at the time, put him to work. At 17, Jellinek began working as a clerk for a railroad company, but the relationship would only last two years, the time it took the managers to find out that Emil organized train races at night. Rabbi Jellinek was forced to intervene again on
Jellinek’s businesses prospered considerably and the family began to enjoy the pleasures of life, one of which was to spend the winter in Nice, on the French Riviera. That is where Emil son developed an enthusiasm for cars, especially for the races that Europe’s aristocracy already enjoyed. Soon he saw himself selling cars, mainly French, and made more money with them than with insurance. Unfortunately, though, Rachel died in 1893, but Emil, for some superstitious reason, thought that the name Mercedes was bringing him luck. In those days he bought a mansion near Nice and named it Villa Mercedes, the same name he was using to sell his cars, at a time when brand names were not as important.
Near the end of the century, Emil saw in a magazine an ad of DMG, Daimler and Maybach’s company. He decided to pay them a visit. He ended up buying a Phönix Double-Phaeton with eight horsepower, with which he soon was racing. In addition, Jallinek became a dealer for DMG. The Phönix won all the races of the 1899 season, under the
Jellinek entered the board of directors of DMG and stayed during eight years, vastly influencing the future of the company. Poor little Mercedes did not as well and went through two bitter marriages before dying penniless before turning 40, but leaving her name for posterity. In 1926, due to the crisis in Germany, Benz & Cie. and DMG closed the circle with the merger that birthed the company Mercedes Benz that we know now, taking advantage of the awareness and reputation of the brand created by Jellinek honoring his daughter. The story that my student told me was partly true, but just partly.