Gottlieb Daimler

By Lucía Cárdenas

If Karl Benz invented the automobile, Gottlieb Daimler invented the engine that made it universal. Born March 17, 1834, in Schorndorf, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, Daimler trained across Europe's best workshops — including a stint in England — and became technical director of Nikolaus Otto's gas-engine company at Deutz. But the big, slow stationary engines of the 1870s could never power a vehicle. Daimler's obsession became speed: a small, light engine running fast enough to be practical on the road.

In 1882 he left Deutz, bought a villa in Cannstatt with his brilliant collaborator Wilhelm Maybach, and set up a secret workshop in the garden shed. By 1884 they had the "grandfather clock" engine — a compact single-cylinder running at up to 900 revolutions per minute, three times faster than anything before it, with hot-tube ignition. It was the ancestor of every gasoline engine since. In 1885 they bolted one onto a wooden bicycle frame: the Reitwagen, the first motorcycle in history, which Maybach's son Paul rode at twelve kilometers an hour. In 1886 came the motorized carriage, the motorboat, and in 1888 a motorized balloon; in 1896, the first motor truck.

Daimler founded the Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1890, but quarreled with his backers and was forced out in 1894, returning only after they bought him out of his patents. He died in Cannstatt on March 6, 1900 — the year his company's cars, built to the specifications of racer Emil Jellinek and named after Jellinek's daughter Mercedes, began conquering the world's racetracks. In 1926 DMG merged with Benz & Cie. His engines had already won: by 1900 the high-speed petrol engine was the beating heart of the automobile age, and it still is.

Daimler's apprenticeship was pan-European. Trained at the Bruderhaus technical school in Reutlingen, he worked in Paris and then for the Armstrong engineering works in England, absorbing the best machine practice of the age before returning to Germany. As technical director of Otto's Deutz company from 1872, he ran the factory that built the world's engines — and grew convinced its future lay elsewhere. The Cannstatt years with Maybach were conducted in near-secrecy: neighbors, suspicious of the shed's noises and smells, reportedly feared the villa housed counterfeiters, and local police were once called. The Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, founded in Cannstatt in 1890, nearly lost him: pushed out by investors in 1894, he returned in triumph when they needed his patents. The Mercedes name came after his death — Emil Jellinek, the Austro-Hungarian racer and dealer, ordered cars built to his specifications and named them for his daughter Mercedes; the 35-horsepower Mercedes of 1901, designed by Maybach, was the first recognizably modern automobile, with its long wheelbase, honeycomb radiator, and gate gearshift.

Impact on civilization

Daimler's high-speed engine decoupled power from place. Before it, engines were stationary giants bolted to factory floors; after it, power became portable — it could ride on two wheels, four wheels, a boat's hull, or an airship's gondola. That portability is the precondition of the entire motor age: the motorcycle, the truck, the motorboat, and eventually the airplane all descend from the Cannstatt garden shed. The truck alone deserves its own monument: motorized freight made the modern supply chain possible, moving food from farm to city and goods from factory to shop at a scale and speed railways could never match. Daimler's deeper gift was the template of the light, fast, mass-producible engine — the mechanical DNA inside more than a billion vehicles on earth today.

The high-speed petrol engine also lifted the first aircraft: the earliest powered airplanes, including the Wright Flyer, ran on light, fast gasoline engines of Daimler's lineage, and the great Zeppelin airships were driven by Maybach engines built on the Cannstatt pattern. Daimler's engine powered the road, the sea, and the first conquest of the air.