This was HILARIOUS!!! I can imagine you and Abby Cox and V. Birchwood and Sarah Chrisman and other costumers sitting around a table dressed as Mercedes Benz marketers riffing on ways to appeal to the "modern woman of today" with tripe from way back then. "Ooooh, but something for the gents with the garters . . . ." Or maybe do a Zoom call.

_and she would go on to become... Albert Einstein_ 😂😂😂

They probably bought her dress on Amazon! That's how it looks. No hat, no gloves, no Parasol. A woman of the Era would would never leave the house.

Thank you for taking this on. The second movie is a good deal more historically accurate. (Movie 1: “Hey, Bavarian hills look totally like Southern California! Nobody will notice.) Bertha Benz brought enough money into the marriage to start her husband’s manufacturing business. She saw that Daimler, their rival, was a better advertiser, and Benz was going to lose market shares. So she took Benz experimental car number three on a 60 mile trip to visit her mother, taking her to eldest sons with her. Basically, she took the family car to visit mom without telling her husband because she knew that he would be afraid to try something so daring. (It was also illegal.) The movies try to make her into some sort of visionary icon, but I think the real story was that she was a intelligent businesswoman with a strong mind and mechanical skills, so she basically did the worlds first joyride, world’s first road trip, and world’s first test driver. (And she had a hat, she used her hat pin to unclog a fuel line.)

Strictly speaking these were not Victorian times depicted. They were Wilhelmine times. Teehee.

These are hilarious! We lived not far from Ladenburg for several years, and it certainly would have been anything but backward. It is close to Heidelberg which had, and still has, one of the most respected universities in Europe. Train travel between Frankfurt and Heidelberg began in 1846. The farming communities could hardly fail to miss the trains and other steam powered vehicles. The article on the Mercedes-Benz page is better, but there is still mention of people thinking that the vehicle was “…the work of the Devil himself….” It makes me wonder if there was a sensational article from the time that this idea came from.

Adelaide- Where did you get your lovely earrings? They look like leverbacks- Are they vintage?

Having had people try to stone me both in the 1980s and 1990s in 2 different states in the USA as they called me "Witch! Witch! Witch!" I can easily see folks in a remote european village in the 1880s calling her a witch and being frightened of her and her horseless carriage.

As a German, I can testify that people in rural areas were quite well educated back then. They had easy access to newspapers and yes, they could read them as they were taught in school, synagogues, churches and so on. You could hardly avoid learning at least a few basics. On the other hand, as in many other countries, the railroad network expanded enormously and connected even remote areas. I know of a case where a family in a small town in Hesse Germany was dispossessed by the local railroad company and was unfortunately very poorly compensated in 1869. Certainly a train is not the same as a car, but people were used to being confronted with a variety of innovations on a regular basis. And as exciting and strange as the introduction of a non-horse-drawn carriage may have been, the idea of traveling without horse power had not been a novelty for decades by this point.

As far as i know the second clip was filmed in a rural area in Hungary, because in todays southern Germany you can't find an area looking so much backward. Indeed, Adelaide, the scenery is arranged in a hugely exaggerated way - i thought nothing else when i first saw this spot. 😏

Fascinating stuff. I'd never heard of Bertha Benz before. But as soon as I saw the clip of the 'medieval' peasants, I thought of Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters". I've just looked it up; it was painted in 1885, so maybe they weren't so far out.

The region where this first tour took place (in southern Germany) is in no way remote, and people have been used to seeing horseless carriages for quite some time since the first german steam engine transported people from Nuremberg to Fürth (some distance away but also southern Germany) half a century earlier. My grandfather on the other side lived in a really remote bavarian village. At the time of the video he wood have been eleven years old, and I know for sure that his family used oxen for plowing. I have the audacity to claim: so did the Belgian farmers. I have no idea why the makers of these videos deemed it necessary to exaggerate the backwardness of the 19th century but for the sake of storytelling, so be it. But no hat, no gloves, NO CORSET? That cannot be forgiven!

Oh my goodness I haven't seen something so bad as that 2nd one in a long time. It's painful seeing something that bad made the way it was.

I grew up in the region where she lived and took out the car for a ride, and I find the second one actually insulting. Heidelberg (one town over, basically) has the oldest university in Germany; it was founded in 1386. That region is anything but a backwards 'medieval' mud bath

I don't know...I've seen a lot of witches driving a Mercedes-Benz..

I am so over the Girlbossification/NLOGing of real, historical women... PS that short story you found is pretty cool!

They made her look like Rosa Luxembourg!

The second one reminds me so much of some Belgian beer/lager ads in either the 80s or 90s in the UK

I hope your video gets more views than the Mercedes Benz video.

Do not cross the lady Adelaide ! 😏

I am so happy that you posted. I can listen to you talking about watching paint dry.

The creepy music of the Belgian film accurately sets the tone for an invention that will go on to destroy the environment and our cities… those villagers had the correct reaction

Thank you Adelaide. It hurts so much, to see this "ads".

I did know this story. I know your analytical mind went nuts over these "commercials/film clips" for several reasons. lol My thing is that if a woman watches something done enough times, she will figure it out. If a woman has faith that something will work & she can make it happen, it will happen. She had faith in her husband when he did not yet & after he got over her taking the car on these trial runs, he was good with it as I remember the story. The German Witch one was a bit much but I agree she looked much more as she should have.

Wow that’s so interesting!!! Now that you’ve pointed these things out I can never unsee 😂

And if the world were as backward as they’re letting on… nobody would have bought the first cars. It really was an over-dramatization. Women worked fields and did more grunt work than men sometimes. Everybody forgets these women went outside to poop without Charmin.

I am here for this takedown. I spend aaaaaaaages fretting over these details - clothing, hair, paved vs. unpaved streets, and so on -when trying to draw a scene From the Past and to see corporations just not putting any stock in such things boils the blood. It can make me slow down on or even stop a drawing, but clearly things are different when a corporation with tons of funds wants to pander and make some ad that is inspirational *for the weirdest reasons*. Now I want to rewatch Horatio's Drive. That whole thing happened about twenty years after the Bertha Benz story and one of my favorite things about the reactions of townspeople to seeing a horseless carriage was that the blacksmiths, who invariably had to step in and help with repairs, dismissed the automobile as a fad that would never take off. And nary a person spat on anybody that I know of.

Great video as always Adelaide!

They are Germans. 'Nuf said-LOL!

I'm veggie.

Hi

She wasn't that special, her Husband invented the Car - she drove it..... Heaven forbidd we give credit to the MAN for his invention. But in this day and age everything has to be shaped and bent to the narrative of a stupid world. At least they didn't dare to change her to Woke standards.