Gottlieb Daimler

German inventor

• Born: March 17, 1834
• Birthplace: Schorndorf, Württemberg (now in Germany)
• Died: March 6, 1900
• Place of death: Cannstatt, Germany

As much as any one person, Daimler was the inventor of the first high-speed motor. A brilliant technician and industrial entrepreneur, he overcame the problems that had retarded the progress of automobile development. Thanks to his carburetion process and development of light engine weight, his motor became adaptable to driving both motor cars and aircraft.

Early Life

The second son of a master baker, Gottlieb Daimler (DIM-lahr) was relatively well educated. He attended public school, followed by two years of Latin school. One of his closest boyhood friends was the son of a master gunsmith, under whose tutelage he apprenticed himself for three years until he produced a piece of work that qualified him as a journeyman. His work entailed precise drawings, which Daimler particularly loved and carried into later life with his depictions of plants and animals.

Journeyman status meant further training en route to mastery. Gottlieb went to work in Alsace, designing machine tools. Recognizing his educational deficiencies, particularly in mathematics, he soon applied his earned savings for two additional years of formal training, this time at the Stuttgart Polytechnic. While in Stuttgart, he came in contact with some of developing Germany’s leading engineers such as Ferdinand von Steinbus. Steinbus, who had been instrumental in the industrial development of Württemberg, subsidized Daimler’s further training in France and England, where he worked variously as a mechanic, foreman, and manager before returning to Württemberg as the manager of Bruderhaus of Rentlingen’s—a highly esteemed firm of machine builders.

While at Bruderhaus, Daimler met Wilhelm Maybach, whose career he helped to shape and with whom he would later collaborate. Maybach, a remarkable young man twelve years Daimler’s junior, had already demonstrated his manual skills and his grasp of mathematics, physics, and mechanical drawing. In 1868, when Daimler assumed the management of one of Karlsruhe’s leading machine shops, he brought Maybach into his drawing office.

As the by-then-unified Germany rapidly industrialized under Otto von Bismarck and opportunities for skilled men blossomed, Daimler accepted a position with the firm of Otto and Langen in Deutz. Nikolaus August Otto and Eugen Langen furthered the practical design and production of an internal combustion engine. Beginning during the 1860’s, Étienne Lenoir made several hundred marketable gas (not gasoline) fired internal combustion engines employed in machine shops and for pumping water. To Lenoir’s impressive, if commercially unsuccessful work, Otto and Langen added the development, largely because of Daimler, of the first four-cycle engine, which in its operations is still the basis of most gasoline engines.

Life’s Work

When Daimler was in his late forties, he decided to leave his employers’ Deutz plant and establish a plant for himself at Cannstatt in 1882. With him went Wilhelm Maybach, by then a masterful machine builder. Daimler’s objective was to develop a practical, high-speed, gasoline-driven motor that would be adaptable to vehicle locomotion. By the beginning of the 1880’s, Daimler’s new four-stroke machines achieved between 150 and 180 revolutions per minute. At 250 revolutions per minute, however, there were problems with ignition and with the proper metering and timing of admixtures of gasoline and air. Daimler had resolved this problem in mechanical terms while working for Otto and Langen by introducing a flame carried in a special slide valve. This commercial result was Daimler’s high-speed motor, capable of nine hundred revolutions per minute. Thirty thousand of these motors were sold internationally within the first decade of its development.

The problem that Daimler set out to resolve when he left Otto and Langen’s remarkably inventive works had to do with the uses to which his inventions were put amid bitter international patent battles. Most of the Otto and Langen (or so-called Deutz) motors were sold to perform stationary functions. After years of losses and borrowing, Otto and Langen, to survive, addressed the available market for their product—customers who required stationary engines requisite to the needs of small workshops and mines. The production of moving vehicles, not only on the ground but also in the air, however, was what Daimler had in view.

At his Cannstatt workshop, Daimler had by 1884 developed a high-speed gasoline engine in which the fuel for the combustion chambers was metered by a wick carburetor and ignited by an electric spark. It was a vertical engine that would soon be built in sizes from one-half to twenty-five horsepower with one, two, and four cylinders and eventually ran at six hundred revolutions per minute. Daimler claimed that he had created the basis for an entirely new industry.

Daimler tested his new motor on a wooden cycle, which he drove in the garden of his Cannstatt home in November, 1885, and then on a boat, the first to be powered by a gasoline engine, both tests proving successful. By the following year, he had produced the four-wheeled Daimler carriage, which soon began making its appearance in Cannstatt and nearby Stuttgart. Its top speed was about six kilometers per hour. Daimler’s motor, with improvements constantly insisted upon by Maybach, was swiftly patented. Maybach, meanwhile, urged Daimler to join his motor and chassis to form a single machine unit. Because Daimler was excited by prospects of mass-producing his vehicles as well as by turning a profit, he soon acquiesced and built a four-wheeled, gasoline-driven carriage that really was an automobile.

While late nineteenth century Germany furnished a marvelous environment for invention and technological innovation, and as a consequence had become one of the world’s foremost industrial powers, Daimler’s automobile did not become popular in that country. It remained for the French to lend the notoriety to Daimler’s car that was essential to its popularity.

On July 1, 1894, the first international automobile race, along the one-hundred-kilometer Paris-Rouen road, was held. The winner was a Daimler machine that reached unprecedented speeds of up to sixty-five miles (110 kilometers) per hour. With world attention on the race, Daimler received eighty thousand francs in prize money. It was manifest at a practical level that the automobile was no longer a rich man’s toy. The race had justified the previous formation of the Daimler Motoren-Gesellschaft in Cannstatt on January 28, 1890, a concern that became one of the world’s great producers of automobiles.

Daimler and Maybach came to be driven less by pure technical considerations than by demands from prospective customers to increase the power of their automobiles from nine horsepower to thirty and forty horsepower. Under these immediate pressures, Daimler by 1900 developed and produced the first modern automobile, judged by power and appearance. Its name was “Mercédès.”

Daimler did not live to enjoy the success of the first Mercedes after 1900. His health had been declining, and he was unable to bear the pressures under which he had worked for more than forty years. He died on March 6, 1900, in Cannstatt.

Significance

A brilliant technician and industrial entrepreneur, Gottlieb Daimler resolved the major problems that had plagued, and had thus retarded, the progress of men who had sought to design and produce automotive vehicles. His competence and technical skill exercised in the development of an efficient carburetor and a lightweight, gasoline-driven engine were responsible for the emergence of the world’s first true automobile, the ultimate expression of which was the Mercedes. His vision was extraordinary as was demonstrated in 1897 by his recommendations to German authorities that they entertain plans for the creation of a motor-driven airship.

Like so many nineteenth century men of achievement, Daimler combined an extraordinary capacity for hard work with keen powers of observation and exceptional farsightedness. Daimler had spoken to his ultimate objectives while still a young man, and he never deviated from them.

Bibliography

Burstall, Aubrey F. A History of Mechanical Engineering. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965. Chapters 7 and 8, although they spend little time on Daimler, place him in context. Excellent schematic illustrations of the Otto engine and Daimler’s 1897 gasoline engine. Directed to intelligent lay readers, it is richly illustrated. Contains reference footnotes, bibliographies, and an index.

Clark, Dugald. The Gas, Oil, and Petrol Engine. 2 vols. London: Basil Blackwell, 1916. Few other works so extensively trace the evolution of these varied engines and the problems that had to be resolved to render them effective. Volume 2 is particularly pertinent in regard to Daimler’s achievements. While the work is old, it remains authoritative and is quite readable. Contains illustrations, bibliographical notations, and a useful index.

Field, D. C. “Internal Combustion Engines.” In The Late Nineteenth Century, c. 1850 to c. 1920. Vol. 5 in A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor Williams. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1958. Clearly and authoritatively written for a general readership, this essay places Daimler’s major contributions in context. There are many precise illustrations. Good select bibliographies follow this (and other) chapters, and there is a useful index for the entire volume.

Hill, Frank Ernest. The Automobile: How It Came, Grew, and Changed Our Lives. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967. Intended primarily for high school readers rather than for college or university students. The early chapters, while somewhat simplistic compared to works cited above, nevertheless afford a sound general picture of Daimler’s work. Includes photographs and an index.

Kames, Beverly Rae. The Star and the Laurel: The Centennial History of Daimler, Mercedes, and Benz, 1886-1986. Montvale, N.J.: Mercedes-Benz of North America, 1986. The history of Daimler-Benz’s first hundred years, including information on Daimler’s and Benz’s inventions before and after they joined forces.

“Maybach Worked, Succeeded in the Shadow of Daimler.” Automotive News 78, no. 6077 (January 26, 2004): 92B. A profile of Wilhelm Maybach, describing his relationship with Daimler and his inventions.

Rae, John B. “The Internal Combustion Engine on Wheels.” In Technology in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 2 in Technology in Western Civilization, edited by Melvin Kranzburg and Carroll Pursell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Written by specialists for a general readership. Rae’s chapter helps place the work of Daimler and other early automotive pioneers in an evolutionary context. Contains an extensive bibliography and an extensive index.

Rolt, Lionel Thomas C. Great Engineers. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962. The only work in English that affords personal details on the life of Daimler and those with whom he worked and competed. Rolt, a British engineer, established himself as a fine, readable historian of engineers, precise and accurate without being pedantic. Contains a useful index.

Wernle, Bradford. “Industry Pioneer Didn’t Even Like to Drive Cars.” Automotive News 75, no. 5908 (December 18, 2000): 20F. A tribute to Daimler, describing how he invented the internal combustion engine, worked with Maybach, and founded his automobile manufacturing company.