Marcus Invents the Car
1865 AD
1865 1865
16.18E48.14N
SCI

VIENNA, AUSTRIA
	Late one night in 1865, Siegfried Marcus of Austria started his automobile and climbed aboard while a husky accomplice held the spinning rear wheels off the ground.
	With Marcus at the controls of his loud, smoke-belching vehicle, the attendant let the wheels down and Marcus took off on a slow sixth-of-a-mile drive, at which point his "Kraftwagen" conked out.
	It was the first recorded trip of an internal combustion engine vehicle.
	While few of Marcus' automobiles were built, Karl Benz -- the next to build an internal combustion vehicle -- was more fortunate, though at first the outlook for his invention wasn't very good.
	In 1888, two years after receiving a patent for his three-wheel "Motorwagen" from the German patent office, Benz had not received a single order for a car.  At that point, his wife got tired of waiting, and without telling him, loaded their two sons in one of Benz's vehicles and drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back, convincing skeptics that the vehicle was safe and dependable.