Friday, April 5, 2019

Bertha Benz, 1800s auto pioneer, featured in commercial

Real life automotive pioneer Bertha Benz (1849-1944) is featured in this 4-minute commercial. Check out all the period details and consider all the behind-the-scenes artists that helped make this mini-movie happen.

This link lists all the credits for production crew (credit names are hyperlinks that share other work)
https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/mercedes_bertha_benz_the_journey_that_changed_everything

More about Bertha Benz and her auto trip, from Wikipedia:
"On 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance,[1] though illegally. Before this historic trip, motorized drives were merely very short trials, returning to the point of origin, made with assistance of mechanics. Following wagon tracks, this pioneering tour covered a one-way distance of about 106 km (66 mi).[8][9]
Although the ostensible purpose of the trip was to visit her mother, Bertha Benz had other motives — to prove to her husband, who had failed to adequately consider marketing his invention, that the automobile in which they both had heavily invested would become a financial success once it was shown to be useful to the general public; and to give her husband the confidence that his constructions had a future.[10]"


More on Bertha Benz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/classic/bertha-benz/?shortener=true&csref=sm_ytb_bertha-benz_pc

Bertha Benz, circa 1870.

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