In 1885, Karl Benz built what’s now con­sid­ered the first mod­ern auto­mo­bile. Accord­ing to the Mer­cedes Benz web­site, the car fea­tured a “com­pact high-speed sin­gle-cylin­der four-stroke engine installed hor­i­zon­tal­ly at the rear, a tubu­lar steel frame … and three wire-spoked wheels. The engine out­put was 0.75 hp (0.55 kW).” Two years after its inven­tion, Karl Ben­z’s wife Bertha proved that the car was ready for prime time, dri­ving her ear­ly Benz from Mannheim to Pforzheim. After that ground­break­ing dri­ve, the Benz went into pro­duc­tion, becom­ing the first com­mer­cial­ly avail­able auto­mo­bile in his­to­ry.

Above, you can watch a car enthu­si­ast known as “Mr. Benz” take the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry car for a spin. Below, watch a re-enact­ment of Bertha’s his­toric dri­ve.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent

The First 100 Years of the Bicy­cle: A 1915 Doc­u­men­tary Shows How the Bike Went from Its Clunky Birth in 1818, to Its Endur­ing Design in 1890

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

A Fly­ing Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Tay­lor Aero­car in Action

Image by Anders Sand­berg, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Asked to imag­ine the char­ac­ter of every­day life in the Mid­dle Ages, a young stu­dent in the twen­ty-twen­ties might well reply, before get­ting around to any oth­er details, that it involved no smart­phones. But even the flashiest new tech­nolo­gies have long evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ries, and, in cer­tain notable respects, even the smart­phone has a medieval ances­tor. That would be the astro­labe, an espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing eleventh-cen­tu­ry exam­ple of which was recent­ly dis­cov­ered at the Fon­dazione Museo Minis­calchi-Eriz­zo in Verona. It was iden­ti­fied by Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge his­to­ri­an Fed­er­i­ca Gigante, who’s been mak­ing the media rounds to explain the con­text and func­tion of this strik­ing and his­toric device.

“It’s basi­cal­ly the world’s ear­li­est smart­phone,” Gigante says in an NPR All Things Con­sid­ered seg­ment. “With one sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion, you can tell the time, but you can also do all sorts of oth­er things.” In a visu­al New York Times fea­ture, Franz Lidz and Clara Van­nuc­ci add that astro­labes, which resem­bled “large, old-fash­ioned vest pock­et watch­es,” also allowed their users to deter­mine “dis­tances, heights, lat­i­tudes and even (with a horo­scope) the future.”

Gigante tells them that, when she got the chance to pay the Minis­calchi-Eriz­zo astro­labe clos­er scruti­ny, she could iden­ti­fy Ara­bic inscrip­tions, “faint Hebrew mark­ings,” and West­ern numer­als, which made this par­tic­u­lar arti­fact “a pow­er­ful record of sci­en­tif­ic exchange between Mus­lims, Jews and Chris­tians over near­ly a mil­len­ni­um.”

In the video above, Seb Falk, author of The Light Ages: The Sur­pris­ing Sto­ry of Medieval Sci­ence, demon­strates how to use an astro­labe to cal­cu­late the time. It is, admit­ted­ly, a more com­pli­cat­ed affair than glanc­ing at the screen of your phone, analo­gies to which have become irre­sistible in these dis­cus­sions. “Like the smart­phone, the astro­labe came into being dur­ing times of eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty — in that case, like­ly dur­ing the height of the Roman Empire,” writes Smith­son­ian ‘s Lau­ra Pop­pick. Though func­tion­al astro­labes were made of ordi­nary wood or met­als, the sur­viv­ing exam­ples tend to be ornate­ly engraved brass, which pro­vid­ed sta­tus val­ue to the high-end mar­ket. In that respect, too, the astro­labe resem­bles the “con­cep­tu­al ances­tor to the iPhone 7” — a device that, in the eyes of technophiles here in 2024, now looks fair­ly medieval itself.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

Watch an Accu­rate Recon­struc­tion of the World’s Old­est Com­put­er, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, from Start to Fin­ish

Behold the Astro­nom­icum Cae­sareum, “Per­haps the Most Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Book Ever Print­ed” (1540)

The Ancient Astron­o­my of Stone­henge Decod­ed

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Image by Erik Möller, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Those of us who were play­ing video games in the nine­teen-nineties may remem­ber a fun lit­tle plat­former, not tech­ni­cal­ly unim­pres­sive for its time, called Clock­work Knight. The con­cept of a clock­work knight turns out to have had some his­tor­i­cal valid­i­ty, or at least it could poten­tial­ly have been jus­ti­fied by the then-cur­rent state of Leonar­do da Vin­ci stud­ies. Back in the fifties, writes Roy­al Mont­gomery at Unchained Robot­ics, “a team of schol­ars at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia were por­ing over a num­ber of Leonar­do da Vinci’s note­books, specif­i­cal­ly the Codices Atlanti­cus and Madrid.” There they found plans for what turned out to be “a life-size mechan­i­cal knight inside a fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Ger­man suit of armor.”

More than one gen­er­a­tion of enthu­si­asts and robot­ics spe­cial­ists have since set about re-cre­at­ing Leonar­do’s “automa­ton.” Before 2007, writes Mont­gomery, “most recon­struct­ed plans includ­ed a mechan­i­cal device in the bel­ly of the knight. It was lat­er deter­mined that this device had noth­ing to do with the knight at all — it was actu­al­ly part of a clock!”

Even if it did­n’t run on lit­er­al clock­work, Leonar­do’s knight would’ve made quite a spec­ta­cle. It “appears to have been assem­bled and dis­played for the first time at a cer­e­mo­ny held by the Prince of Milan, Ludovi­co Sforza in 1495,” and in this sole appear­ance “could sit and stand, lift its own visor, and move its arms. It was stiff, sure, but you try mov­ing grace­ful­ly in 15th cen­tu­ry armor.”

How­ev­er much it amused its aris­to­crat­ic audi­ence, Leonar­do’s sur­rep­ti­tious­ly pul­ley-and-cable-oper­at­ed “robot” would also have offered work­ing, inte­grat­ed proof of the kind of mechan­i­cal sys­tems to which he’d long put his for­mi­da­ble engi­neer­ing mind. And today, as point­ed out at the site of the Robot­ic Online Short Film Fes­ti­val, “we are fas­ci­nat­ed and ter­ri­fied in equal parts by humanoid robots for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es like Atlas, cre­at­ed by the com­pa­ny Boston Dynam­ics for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Unit­ed States). They are all heirs, with twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy, to the robot­ic sol­dier designed by Leonar­do.” The ques­tion of whether he also did any pio­neer­ing work on robot ani­mals who could dance remains a mat­ter of inquiry for future Leonar­do schol­ars.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explore the Largest Online Archive Explor­ing the Genius of Leonard da Vin­ci

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

The Amaz­ing Engi­neer­ing of Gauntlets (Armored Gloves) from the 16th Cen­tu­ry

200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automa­tons in Action

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.