Here are eight amazing women from automotive history

In 1888, Bertha Benz – business partner and wife of Carl Benz – travelled 67 miles in 12 hours in the first Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Village folk on her journey (via Wiesloch pharmacy for more 'fuel') didn’t know what to make of the mechanised carriage, perhaps suspecting the horseless thing was the work of witchcraft. Thankfully Bertha wasn’t burned at the stake. Now, she’s considered the grandma of the car.

Dominique Serra founded the gruelling Rallye Aicha Des Gazelles - an all-female rally across the Moroccan desert ‘promoting courage, daring and the strength of women'. It supports North African charities that help women in reading, personal hygiene and refuge, and has enabled over 10,600 participants from 16-81 years old to compete in conditions like those found in the Dakar.

Image: Les Reporters du Net.fr

Speaking of the Dakar, it would be remiss not to mention Jutta Kleinschmidt. The German first entered in 1988 on a BMW motorcycle, before deciding four wheels were better than two and returning in 1994. Though she got on the podium for various stages over the following years, it wasn’t until 2001 when she became the first woman to win the Rally. A serious lesson in persistence.

One of Hollywood's 'Golden Age' stars - and apparently the inspiration for the face of Disney’s Snow White - Lamarr was also a prolific inventor. The mathematically minded chemist invented loads of things, most notably frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) – the basis of Bluetooth and other secure comms we still use today.

Image: Bombshell -The Hedy Lamarr Story

Back in 1927, 26-year-old racing driver Claerenore Stinnes embarked on an epic round-the-world adventure. The German hotshoe took a 49bhp Adler Standard 6, a small crew and a few spare parts on a whopping 29,000-mile odyssey. Unsurprisingly with that magnitude of engine power, it took her (and her Swedish filmmaker companion) over two years to get from Frankfurt to Berlin, via Russia, Japan, Hawaii and the Americas – talk about going around the streets and houses.

We’re not even going to pretend to understand the complex computer programming that super-maths-boffin Gladys Mae West cooked up throughout her career. But it’s long acknowledged that West made crucial contributions to the development of GPS in the mid-80s. And she did it in a world of cultural (and often hostile) adversity, as depicted in the film Hidden Figures.

Michele Mouton had a legendary rally career in the 1970s and '80s. From chucking her dad's Porsche 911 around the twisty back roads of the French Riviera as young girl, to celebrating victory as the first woman to win a Rally Championship in 1986, Mouton continuously broke new ground. Often sideways. Finish driver Ari Vatanen sums it up in the Queen of Speed documentary about Mouton's supernatural talent: "Her speed took me and everybody else by surprise. It put our masculine pride on a test."

Langmuir-Blodgett film is the stuff that stops glass from being reflective. Katharine Burr Blodgett is best known for patenting anti-reflective coatings with lab partner, Irving Langmuir in the late 1930s. The film is also used in cameras, and created a crystal clear image for the film Gone with the Wind. With the number of cameras used in cars going up, Blodgett's legacy is only deepening in automotive.

Image: General Electric (1954)