In 1817, Baron Karl von Drais – then 32 – caused quite a stir. The people of Mannheim, then a modest city in southwest Germany, paused their usual errands to gawk at the man riding not in a carriage, nor on horseback, but atop a wooden contraption with two wheels. He called it a “laufmaschine” as he rode through town.

It was a bumpy ride, with the quality of the roads and the wooden wheels, but it was still much faster than walking. The press at the time likened it to riding a horse and called it a “draisine” after its inventor managed a 14 km trip in less than an hour. Faster than the post coach, this was a true revolution.

If the story ended there, Mannheim would already have secured its place in the pantheon of transportation. But fate—or maybe something in the water around Mannheim—had even bigger plans. Because 70 years later, just across town, a young engineer named Karl Benz would do something equally audacious: he would build the first automobile powered by a gasoline engine.

Mannheim is not just the birthplace of one revolutionary vehicle—it is the unlikely womb of two.

A horse that doesn’t eat

The history of the bicycle is still disputed. Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, created a sketch from around 1500 AD that seems to resemble a bicycle. The sketch is considered by most historians to be a fraud, but some still claim it was real.

Later, and equally unverified, is the claim of a “Comte de Sivrac” who allegedly developed a célérifère in 1792. It is now thought that the two-wheeled célérifère never existed. The first reliable, recorded claim of a true bicycle is from Drais’ contraption.

Karl von Drais invented the bicycle not in a flash of whimsy but out of practical desperation. In 1815, a volcano in Indonesia (Mount Tambora) sent ashes throughout the Earth’s atmosphere, temporarily cooling temperatures and triggering widespread crop failures across much of the world. The following year, 1816, is often called “the year without summer.” People starved; horses starved even worse. People resorted to eating their horses out of desperation. Drais thought there should be a better way.

He started looking for an alternative form of personal transport that didn’t rely on animal power. Drawing on his background as a forester and his keen observational eye, he mimicked the gait of a trotting horse by designing a two-wheeled wooden frame that the rider could straddle and propel with alternating foot pushes. The result was his Laufmaschine, or “running machine”—a horse that needed no feed, no rest, and, above all, no oats. It was a radical shift: the first step in transferring mobility from animal muscle to human ingenuity.

But the world wasn’t quite ready for the bicycle just yet. The roads were brutal, the products were shoddy, and several cities banned draisines, including Milan in 1818, London and New York in 1819, and Calcutta in 1920. The bike’s moment of fame fizzled like the spark from a flintlock pistol.

Drais, an idealistic tinkerer, had a streak of bad timing. He was a fervent liberal supporter and was attacked several times; he even survived an assassination attempt. He’d go on to invent the railway handcar (later also known as the draisine). Yet his political positions came back to haunt him. His enemies, the Royalists, confiscated his money and tried to lock him up. He fell into poverty and was mocked and marginalized.

His invention, meanwhile, entered a 40-year hibernation.

Then came the pedals

In the 1860s, French inventors Pierre and Ernest Michaux bolted pedals onto the front wheel of the draisine’s descendants. Thus was born the velocipede, or as it was lovingly nicknamed, the “boneshaker.” Bigger front wheels followed, creating the famous “penny-farthing”—an image burned into steampunk posters and vintage postcards. But it wasn’t until the invention of the roller chain in 1879, and the addition of equal-sized wheels and rear-wheel drive, that the modern bicycle found its form.

By then, cycling had stopped being a curiosity and started becoming a movement. The humble bike was democratizing mobility, especially for women.

At a time when women’s lives were largely confined to the domestic sphere and their movements were barred by social norms and restrictive clothing, the bicycle became a vehicle of freedom—both literally and symbolically. Unlike carriages, which required horses and often a male driver, a bicycle could be ridden alone, on one’s own schedule, without needing permission or accompaniment. It enabled women to travel further, faster, and more freely than ever before.

Susan B. Anthony called it a tool of emancipation. “It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance,” she said. “The moment she takes her seat, she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

Today, bicycles are the most common vehicles on Earth—over one billion strong, a silent army of spokes and steel. They emit nothing, take up almost no space, and offer a way to reimagine cities. No wonder the United Nations has declared June 3rd World Bicycle Day, honoring the machine that started it all on a cobbled street in Mannheim.

The Benz of a New Era

You’d think that would be enough legacy for one town. But Mannheim wasn’t finished.

Nearly seven decades after Drais’ historic ride, another inventor with a fondness for gears was hard at work in a nearby workshop. Karl Benz—engineer, entrepreneur, and, like Drais, an unshakable dreamer—had been obsessed with building a horseless carriage. He’d already built a stationary gasoline engine, but his true ambition was to put it on wheels.

In 1885, he did.

Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but he eventually followed in his father’s steps toward locomotive engineering.

His three-wheeled “Patent-Motorwagen” looked half sewing machine and half car. Its tiny one-cylinder engine produced just 0.75 horsepower, enough to reach 10 mph on a good day. But it worked. In 1886, Benz filed a patent—No. 37435—for a “vehicle powered by a gas engine,” and history quietly changed direction.

The patent simply read “automobile fueled by gas”. Early demonstrations also weren’t everything Benz hoped for. The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. Yet again, road quality was a big problem and skeptics started mocking Benz. But he persevered. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. Benz first publicly drove the car on 3 July 1886 in Mannheim at a top speed of 16 km/h (10 mph).

So in 1888, it was left to Bertha Benz, Karl’s wife and co-conspirator, to prove its worth. One August morning, without telling her husband or asking for permission from the authorities, she and her two teenage sons snuck out and drove the Patent-Motorwagen from Mannheim to her mother’s house in Pforzheim, 180 kilometers away, round trip.

It was a historic trip. She became the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance. Before this historic trip, motorized drives were merely very short trials, returning to the point of origin. Mechanics often stepped in to make various fixes. Bertha Benz showed that the age of cars truly was coming and made history.

Two Wheels. Three Wheels. One Revolution.

In a twist of cosmic symmetry, both Drais and Benz were born in Karlsruhe, just a short ride from Mannheim. Both came from privilege but spent their lives battling social rejection. Both invented something radically new, only to find that the world wasn’t quite ready.

And yet, over time, their machines changed everything.

Drais gave us the bicycle, an invention so adaptable that it remains a frontline weapon in the fight against urban pollution and climate change. Benz gave us the car, which created the modern city, the suburb, the freeway—and the sprawling infrastructure and emissions crises we now wrestle with.

Mannheim, once just a waystation between the Neckar and the Rhine, gave us both.

Today, if you happen to visit Mannheim, you can visit the Technoseum, where a replica of Drais’ Laufmaschine sits in honor, as well as the site where Karl Benz filed his patent. There’s even a Bertha Benz Memorial Route you can follow, tracing her pioneering journey through the German countryside.

The city is now dotted with bike lanes, e-mobility hubs, and a gleaming bike garage by the main train station. It is, fittingly, a place where the past rides alongside the future.