On 29 January 1886 Carl Benz filed an application in Berlin for a patent on his three-wheeled "motorwagen". That date - 125 years ago this week - has always been celebrated as the birthday of the automobile. Not long after, Gottlieb Daimler built the first four-wheeled motorised carriage.
Between them, working completely independently of each other, they laid the foundations of all today's cars, trucks and buses. The Patent Motorwagen was an exquisitely engineered lightweight, the Daimler a sturdy people carrier.
But at first nobody wanted them; the hissing, snorting, smoking machines were distrusted as "the devil's work" and anyway, they would never be as reliable as a one-horsepower hayburner.
Something had to be done so, early one morning in August 1888, Benz's wife Bertha - a woman of considerable character and personal charm - took the Motorwagen (without her husband's knowledge), loaded up their two sons and set off from their home in Mannheim to visit her family in Pforzheim, 104km away.
It took about 16 hours - half the time it would have taken in a horse-drawn carriage - and late that evening Bertha was able to send her husband a telegram from Pforzheim to say they'd arrived safely. And a couple of days later she drove back again, following the scenic route along the banks of the Rhine to avoid some steep hills.
A new age of mobility had dawned - no arguments.
When Daimler was technical head of the Deutz engine company in the early 1880's he drew a star over a photo of the factory and his home alongside, as a symbom of progress; after that he and his sons used a three-pointed star as their emblem, particularly after Daimler left Deutz to pursue his dream of a self-propelled carriage.
But horseless carriages is exactly what they were - and that wasn't good enough for Emil Jellinek, a silver-tongued Leipzig lad who, ten years later, was making a good living selling expensive cars to the titled rich of Nice on the French Riviera - and having a lot of fun racing them.
He went to see Daimler's sons and their chief engineer, Wilhelm Maybach, at the factory in Canstatt and demanded a new car - lower, longer, more powerful, with a steel chassis, decent brakes and a steering wheel on an angled steering column instead of a tiller.
And he wanted it named after his daughter Mercedes.
With that first car the era of the horseless cariage was gone for good. The 1901, four-cylinder, Mercedes 35hp was revolutionary; it won every race it was entered in for several years and turned the auto industry on its ear as every auto manufacturer in Europe scrambled to catch up.
The motor car as we know it was born and every Canstatt product from then on was called a Mercedes. Small wonder, then, that when the Daimler and Benz companies merged in 1926, the cars they built carried a three-pointed star and the name Mercedes-Benz.
The Mercedes 35hp was also the first car with a honeycomb radiator; its powerful engine, mounted low in the chassis, was the first with its valves controlled by a camshaft. It wasn't the first four-cylinder car, however; Wilhelm Maybach had already put a four-banger in the cumbersome 1898 Daimler Phaeton.
Carl Benz once said: "The love of inventing never dies." In 1923 Benz launched the first diesel-engined truck and, in 1936, the Mercedes-Benz 260D became the world's first volume-produced diesel passenger car.
And the "Star Car" guys are still thinking ahead; a Mercedes-Benz design study in the early 1980's for a "short-distance transport vehicle" was the starting point for two very different designs - the A-Class and the Smart.
Eckart Mayer, Divisional Manager, Mercedes-Benz Cars SA, summed it up: "2011 is a very special year for us. On Saturday, January 29 we celebrate 125 years of innovation alongside our Daimler colleagues worldwide. All our campaigns, staff and customer activities during 2011 will incorporate an element of celebration around this important milestone, including a prominent display at the Johannesburg auto show.
"A replica of that first car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen, and an original 1901 Benz Velo - the first car in South Africa - will be on show at a number of special events during the year, where motoring enthusiasts will have opportunity to see these classic cars."