New Years’ Eve, 1879. 35 year old Karl Benz and his wife Bertha are huddled around a small block of iron. Karl no doubt thinks about the decade’s worth of work and near-financial ruin contained in its small footprint. But even if he can finally get it to run smoothly, it’s only a first step. His end goal is to use it in a horseless carriage, with the hopes of changing the way people move. But how did Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach revolutionize the internal combustion engine? How did they create an industry from essentially nothing? And how is the story of the automobile itself inextricable from the story of Mercedes-Benz? Today on Past Gas, the first episode in a four-part series on the history of Mercedes-Benz.

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