That evening, Bertha wired Karl to say they had arrived safely. But not, as it turned out, without incident. Bertha was obliged to clean out a clogged fuel line with her hatpin and mend an ignition wire with one of her garters. When the brake shoe started to give way, she stopped at a farrier's in Bauschlott for a block of leather to replace it. In Wiesloch, she stopped at an apothecary to fill up on benzene (this pharmacy still bills itself as the world's first filling station). And so it happened that the world's first motorist was, in fact, a woman.

[Jalopnik's Question of the Day believes in unicorns and mermaids. Have a question you need answered? Email suggestions to tips@jalopnik.com with the subject line "QOTD"]

Eighteen eighty five is so 122 years ago, Karl. All the coolest engineers and great thinkers were inventing cars back in 1478. Well, if by "car" you mean self-propelled conveyance, then yes, this is totally a car. (If you're going to be a d-bag and insist on internal combustion, then no, but you'd have to be Canadian to define it so narrowly.) Okay, Enough hubris; back to the retro-futuristic innovationism that is the Da Vinci car. The engineer in me really gets hot over the linear output of the spring-drive system big Leo D designed for this thing. Normally a spring drive just can't provide linear output, but DaVinci was kind of a genius and he figured out how to do it. Also new for the 1478 model year was the ability to steer and brake. Some nerds at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy decided to recreate this thing from Leo's original notes. What you see above is the result. Nobody really knows if DaVinci built a prototype, but who cares? It's cool and old. Wait a week and there will be a YouTube vid of some hooligan with JATO bottles strapped to it.–Ben Wojdyla

L'Automobile di Leonardo Da Vinci [Museum of the History of Science (in Italian)]

Related:
Motorwagen and Ramen [internal]

It may have only had .75hp. It may have sounded more like industrial equipment than what we know as an automobile. But Karl Benz' Motorwagen birthed and snuffed more nations than D.W. Griffith ever dreamed possible in a very short span of time. Meanwhile, Momofuko Ando who invented instant ramen — essentially the Kia Rio of foodstuffs — died Friday. However, college life will go on, and it's rather funny to see Dan Neil obliquely reference the danger of bits of a rotating assembly ending up in his colon while tooling around Pasadena dressed as a man who could conceivably own a penny farthing. Ah, history. – Davey G. Johnson

Before the Rumble Seat [LA Times]

Related:
Der Auto Dom: Dan Neil on Germany's Shrines to Der Wagen [Internal]

We don't know if there's really one day that can truly be celebrated as the birth of the commercial automobile, but it figures that today, January 29th which marks the 120th anniversary of Karl Benz's patent on his three-wheeled motoring machine is as good as any. So happy birthday, automobile. You've brought us more joy than grief, and well, you gave us a damn career. Without you, we'd be writing, uh, we don't know, Kotaku or something. [Thanks to zeroSignal for the heads-up.]

Karl Benz [Wikipedia]

Related:
Lamborghini Miura Celebrates 40th Anniversary [Internal]