Gottlieb Daimler was born in Schorndorf in Germany in 1834. He was an
engineer, industrial designer, industrialist, pioneer of the modern
internal combustion engine and a workaholic before the term was
invented. A persistent perfectionist, he drove himself and his
co-workers mercilessly. Daimler was a cosmopolitan man, instrumental in
founding auto industries in Germany, France and England. His core
ability was engines, and he didn’t care whether they were powering cars,
boats, trams, pumps or airships. He is also known for inventing the
first high-speed petrol engine and the first four-wheel automobile.
Talking about Daimler’s early life, his father wanted his son to
become a municipal employee, but the young, mechanically inclined
Daimler instead apprenticed himself to a gunsmith. After four years of
his apprenticeship Daimler worked in a steam-engine factory and
eventually completed his schooling at the Stuttgart Polytechnic. He
spent the next three decades working as an engineer and technical
director of engine development for several companies.
It was during this period that he worked with Nikolaus August Otto,
the inventor of the four-cycle internal combustion engine, and Wilhelm
Maybach, who become Daimler’s lifelong collaborator.
Daimler’s and Maybach’s dream was to create small high speed engines
to be mounted in any kind of locomotion device. They designed a
precursor of the modern petrol engine which they subsequently fitted to a
two-wheeler and considered the first motorcycle and, in the next year,
to a stagecoach, and a boat. They are renowned as the designers of this
Grandfather Clock engine. This helped push them ahead of other inventors
who were emerging as competitors. In 1882 Daimler and Maybach set up a
factory in Stuttgart to develop light, high-speed, gasoline-powered
internal combustion engines. Their aim from the start appears to have
been to apply these engines to vehicles.
In 1890 Daimler and Maybach formed the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft
in Stuttgart, but they left the company only a year later in order to
concentrate on various technical and commercial development projects. A
Daimler-powered car won the first international car race–the 1894
Paris-to-Rouen race. Of the 102 cars that started the competition, only
fifteen completed it, and all finishers were powered by a Daimler
engine.
The success of the Paris-to-Rouen race may also have been a factor in
Daimler’s and Maybach’s decision to rejoin the Daimler Motor Company in
1895. In the following year, the Daimler Company produced the first
road truck, and in 1900 the company produced the first Mercedes
automobile (named for the daughter of the financier backing Daimler).
The man who is widely credited with pioneering the modern automobile
industry apparently did not like to drive and may never have driven at
all. Certainly Gottlieb Daimler was a passenger in 1899 during a rough,
bad weather journey that accelerated his declining health and
contributed to his death the following spring of heart disease on March
6, 1900, in Stuttgart, Germany, after a lifetime as an inventor in the
forefront of automobile development. Daimler’s auto company merged with
the Benz Company (also of Germany) in 1926, forming the Mercedes-Benz
automobile company later.
