After Gottlieb Daimler moved into the villa in the Taubenheimstrasse in Cannstatt with his family in 1882, he reconverted his garden house into a workshop. The room with a tool bench and a forge became the refuge for Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach. Here the two engineers wanted to realize their vision of individual mobility: a transportable universal motor for vehicles on water, on the land and in the air.
They worked day and night with strict secrecy. Even the family and the household servants did not know what was happening in the garden house. Daimler's distrustful gardener even called in the police because he believed that they were counterfeiting coins in the garden house. The surprise was big when the police only found tools and motor parts. In the garden house, Daimler and Maybach developed the first sprinting motor in 1883, in 1885 the first light sprinting motor was created here, the so-called "grandfather clock" which could be built into the vehicles. The first attempt was a two wheeler, the so-called "riding wagon", the first motorcycle in the world. In 1886, Daimler and Maybach built the motor into a coach, at the same time it was used for the first motor boat in the world, the "Neckar".
The garden house quickly became too small. In July 1887, Daimler moved into a factory building on Seelberg. The workshop ambience, drawings, documents, photographs and models (the first motor boat from 1886, Wolfertsches air ship from 1888) today still impart some of the flair of these years.
