Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Carl Benz are among those who have granted their names to the house of The Three-Pointed Star. The name the world knows best, Mercedes, is also an eponym but its owner has lived in a more obscure corner of lore. The personal effects of Hans-Peter Schlosser include photos of his mother, one Mercedes Adrienne Ramona Manuela Jellinek, the woman whose name continues to launch a thousand ‘ships’ about every seven hours. Schlosser was Mercedes’ son, and his keepsakes have wound their way to the Mercedes-Benz archives, which had been missing an informative record of the woman herself.
Mercedes was the daughter of German businessman and gentleman racer Emil Jellinek. One of his ventures was selling cars, and when he discovered Daimler and Maybach’s car, the Phoenix, he worked up a brisk business and an even larger fortune selling them. Details on how the DMG Phoenix became a Mercedes are hazy, but Jellinek’s inclination to name things after his daughter – like his yacht and all of his homes – would eventually work its way around to the cars he sold, raced and drove.
In fact, Emil so enjoyed the Mercedes name and good fortune he believed it brought that the entire family clan name was changed to Jellinek-Mercedes when Mercedes was 13. Yet a name wasn’t the only contribution Jellinek made, pressing Daimler and Maybach to build racing cars even before the turn of the 20th century, saying, “Victories make you world-famous. People buy the winning brand, and always will. It would be commercial suicide to stay away from racing.”
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