Book Review

Early one August morning in 1888 Frau Berta Benz and her two teenaged sons pushed Model 3 out of the shed and down the block, so as not to waken father once the flywheel was spun and the noisy little engine started. They were off to Grandmother's house, 60 miles away in the hills beyond Heidelberg. The car they had quietly borrowed was one of Karl Benz's tricycle Motorwagens, then, along with Gustav Daimler's, the only working automobiles in the world. Off in gentle conspiracy they sped at 15 miles an hour -- their overloaded pioneer vehicle traveling along a road utterly innocent of engines and even hostile to them by local law...

Intrepid, independent Berta alone in the Benz household realized that the future they foresaw for the little cars would hardly come until the public imagination was caught; this was her day to break the leash of timid use...

The text is lively, the events carefully authenticated and illustrated by page after page of color wash paintings of dazzling detail and evocative power...This deliciously tendentious book has a timely moral in mind: "Encourage your daughter to get dirty, take things apart, and challenge the question as well as the answer." (If you haven't any daughters, tell it to your sons.)

~ Philip amd Phylis Morrison, Scientific American exerpt