Porsche The Road from Zuffenhausen

Chapter 1 The Father Professor Ferdinand Porsche Ferdinand Porsche was born on September 3, 1875, just in time not only to witness the evolution of the automobile but also to participate in its development. When he was eleven years old, Ferdinand became fascinated with a new invention patented in 1886 by German machinist Karl Benz. In his Mannheim workshop Benz had created what historians regard as the first motorcar, but more important, he had inspired others to follow in his path, among them young Porsche. Fourteen years later, as an engineer in the employ of the Lohner motorworks in Vienna, Ferdinand Porsche designed his first motorcar, the Lohner-Wagen, a small, four-person carriage powered by two electric motors, each developing 0.98 horsepower and turning the front wheels. While this would appear to make Porsche one of the earliest pioneers of front-wheel drive technology, his design was not influenced by any contemporary ideology promoting the advantages of front-driven wheels. In point of fact one could say that Porsche's design was conceived by using "horse sense." The motors replaced the horse, the horse pulled the carriage, and thus the electric motors were placed in the front. Interestingly, this was not the common practice at the turn of the century. Most early horseless carriages had their engines mounted in the rear, under the seat, with chain-driven rear wheels. In 1901, Wilhelm Maybach and Paul Daimler partly changed that tradition by positioning the engine under the front bonnet of the revolutionary new Mercedes, what was to be the first modern automobile. The drive, however, still went to the rear wheels via chains. Despite the Mercedes' success, electric motorcars were more popular for a brief period in the 1900s than either steam-powered cars or those equipped with noisy, obstreperous internal combustion engines. In September 1900, intent on building even better electric motor wagons, Porsche had designed the Lohner-Porsche racing car, which was delivered to British sportsman E. W. Hart. This example used not two but four motors, one at each wheel. Almost ninety years later, Porsche's son Ferry would write of this design in his autobiography, Cars Are My Life: "[This] racing car designed by my father used the same mode of propulsion as was applied to the American 'moon car' driven on the moon by astronauts David R. Scott and James B. Irwin in July 1971." That simple anecdote underscored Ferdinand Porsche's entire career. From the very beginning he looked beyond contemporary practice and searched for ways to improve what appeared to be in no need of improvement. This ideology was to serve him well in his first managerial position as technical director of Austro-Daimler. The firm was established in Vienna in 1899 as the Austrian branch of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, which had become one of Germany's most successful manufacturers of motor carriages and internal combustion engines. By the 1890s, D-M-G founder Gottlieb Daimler and his associate, Wilhelm Maybach, had developed a four-wheel motor carriage and the first motor-driven fire engines and general-purpose trucks (lorries), and had successfully completed experiments with dirigibles. This latter event was to play a significant role in Maybach's future. The first designer at Daimler's Austrian branch, located in Wiener Neustadt, was Gottlieb's son Paul. Riding on the success of the 1901 Mercedes, Paul assumed his new position in 1902. He was instrumental in Austro-Daimler's early achievements, but by 1906 there was growing disharmony between Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft and its Austrian subsidiary. Paul had been called back to Germany in 1905, and the following year Austro-Daimler divorceAdler, Dennis is the author of 'Porsche The Road from Zuffenhausen', published 2003 under ISBN 9780375502163 and ISBN 0375502165.