Recently, I was in Stuggart, Germany. This is the home to the headquarters of both Daimler-Benz (or Daimler-Chrysler as it now is) and also Porsche. Both companies have fascinating museums. The thing that makes them especially interesting is that so much of what became the modern automobile was invented in the area around Stuttgart. Of course, a lot of the basics of mass production of cars was invented by Henry Ford, but he didn't invent the car itself. The key to Ford's production was making parts to sufficiently tight tolerances that they could simply be assembled by non-craftsmen, as opposed to being filed and adjusted by "fitters". I still find it surprising that the second largest production run of a car remains, even today, the Ford Model T, with over 15M manufactured.

Porsche today is famous for high-performance sports cars, but over time they have been in various other aspects of vehicles, including even agricultural tractors. You can see many of these unusual vehicles at the Porsche Museum. Porsche also invented a number of technologies that became widely used, in particular, the synchromesh gearbox. In the 1930s, Ferdinand Porsche designed the distinctly un-Porsche-like Volkswagen Beetle. This is the only car to be manufactured in greater volume than the Ford Model T, passing it in 1972, and going on to a production run of 21.5M (not counting the modern "new" version).

But the origins of the automobile are best seen at the other museum, the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

The four-stroke engine, also known as the Otto Engine, was invented by Niklaus Otto in 1876. A four-stroke engine (which is what is in pretty much any internal combustion engine car today) operates as follows. On the first stroke, the inlet valve is opened as the piston descends, sucking a fuel-air mixture into the cylinder (in a modern car, a fuel injector is used so this description needs a little adjustment). One the second stroke, driven by a flywheel (and the other cylinders, once multi-cylinder engines were built) the fuel-air mixture is compressed as the cylinder ascends. In a modern car, a spark plug is used to ignite the fuel-air mixture, but in Otto's original engines a gas flame was used. The third stroke is the power stroke. As the fuel-air mixture burns, it expands and pushes the cylinder down. On the final fourth stroke, the piston once again ascends, driven by the flywheel, and the exhaust valve opens to allow the burned gases to exit the cylinder. However, Otto's engines were enormous and were only suitable for static applications.

Gottfried Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach went to work there (near Cologne/Köln) but they fell out with Otto, seemingly because Daimler wanted to develop small engines for transportation, but Otto had no interest.

The Grandfather Clock

The first small gasoline engine was the "grandfather clock" engine, invented in Cannstadt (Stuttgart) by Daimler and Maybach. This is pretty much the first thing you come to when you visit the museum. It had a single cylinder. It was developed in the early 1880s and patented in 1885. Two key pieces of technology were the primitive carburetor and the hot-tube ignition. The carburetor on this first engine was called a surface carburetor, with the fuel mixed with the air by simply passing the air over the volatile petroleum. The ignition was non-electric, with a burner under a tube attached to the cylinder making it red hot. When the fuel-air mixture reached the red-hot part of the tube it would ignite. Ignition timing could be adjusted by moving the flame in this very early design.

The features of this engine were:

• A single cylinder of 264cc
• Air-cooled
• Large cast iron flywheel
• Surface carburetor
• Hot tube ignition system
• Cam-operated exhaust valves
• 0.5hp at 600rpm running speed
• Weight of around 50kg (~110 lbs)

Subsequently, they developed a more powerful version of this engine, which generated 1hp at 600rpm. The first vehicle to which it was fitted was the Reitwagen (riding car), which was thus the first petrol-driven vehicle, and also the first petrol-driven motorbike, albeit with training wheels.

The First Automobile

Independently, Karl Benz and Daimler created an automobile in 1886. Although today Daimler-Benz is one company, for a long time they were separate. Daimler was in Canstadt (where the factory and museum are today, just a couple of subway stops from central Stuttgart) and Benz was in Mannheim, about 40 miles to the north. Somewhat surprisingly, due to the relatively short distances involved, they never met. Benz used a two-stroke engine of his own design. Benz would go on to invent the idea of electric spark ignition from a battery, the spark plug to make it work, the clutch, and water cooling with a radiator. Much of what we consider part of a normal car started in Mannheim.

Daimler/Maybach fitted a grandfather clock engine to a Phaeton (4-wheeler) carriage, designed to be used with horses of course.

Meanwhile, Benz's first automobile was a three-wheeler since he wasn't happy with any of the technologies available for two-wheel steering.

Benz's wife, Bertha, was a rich woman and was the investor in the company. In a story reminiscent of self-driving cars today, the city of Mannheim refused to give a permit for Benz to test the car on public roads. But his wife seems to have been someone who liked to ignore convention. As I related recently in a post about the NXP panel sessions on automotive:

Without telling her husband or the city, she decided to take the car to her mother, around 70 miles away through the countryside, along with her two sons. It was August 5 1888. She was a nerdy engineering girl, fixed a number of problems on the road. Her sons had to push it up the hill. There were obviously no gas stations, but there was a pharmacy where she bought half a gallon of benzene. The pharmacy is still there with a sign saying “first gas station in the world.” A few years later they sold 600 cars per year.

So that's how the very early history of the automobile all took place in the two towns of Stuttgart and Mannheim, 40 miles away from each other. Of course, the Mercedes-Benz museum goes on to show how the two companies merged (in 1926) to form Daimler-Benz, and all their cars were named Mercedes-Benz. Mercédès was the ten-year-old daughter of Emil Jellinek who had specified one of the most important early automobiles and asked for it to be named after his daughter.

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