Gottlieb Daimler

Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler produced their automobiles independently of each other in 1886, working in German towns about sixty miles apart with no evidence of collaboration or shared knowledge of the other's project. Benz filed his patent application for a purpose-built three-wheeled "automobile fueled by gas" on 29 January 1886 and is consequently the figure usually named first and alone as the automobile's inventor. Daimler, working with Wilhelm Maybach, instead motorized an existing stagecoach-style carriage the same year; because his vehicle was a converted horse-drawn design rather than one engineered from the ground up as a motor vehicle, most popular accounts read it as a parallel achievement rather than the founding one, a distinction historians of Daimler's own work regard as arbitrary given how close the two efforts ran.