People · 1846–1929
Wilhelm Maybach.
The French called him the king of constructors. He designed the first modern automobile, the carburetor and the radiator that made every other one possible — and never owned a car in his life. He walked, or took the tram.
In 1856 a ten-year-old boy in Stuttgart lost the second of his parents. Relatives placed a notice in a newspaper, and a charitable institution in Reutlingen — the Bruderhaus — took him in, taught him mathematics, French and English, and put him in its engineering works. Seven years later a new manager arrived to run those works, an ambitious engineer twelve years his senior. The orphan was Wilhelm Maybach. The manager was Gottlieb Daimler.
For the next thirty-five years they were inseparable: Daimler the strategist, Maybach the hands. Wikipedia's dry summary — that Maybach was “the more creative thinking” of the two — understates what the record shows: nearly every mechanism that made the early automobile work came off his drawing board. When the two needed a word for what he did, the French supplied it: roi des constructeurs.
Chapter I
Following Daimler.
Wherever Daimler went, Maybach followed: to Karlsruhe as a draftsman in 1869, to the Deutz engine works in 1873 — where, as chief designer at twenty-seven, he made Nikolaus Otto's four-stroke engine fit for series production — and in 1882, after Daimler's falling-out with Otto, to the converted greenhouse in the garden of Daimler's villa in Cannstatt. There, working hours so strange the neighbors called the police on them, he built the engine that changed everything.
The Standuhr of 1885 — the “Grandfather Clock” — ran at 600 rpm when the engines of the day turned at 120 to 180. It was small enough to carry and strong enough to drive a vehicle, which it promptly did: bolted into a wooden two-wheeler, it became the first motorcycle, and Maybach — the quiet one — rode it three kilometers down the Neckar valley at twelve kilometers an hour.
Chapter II
The parts everyone else needed.
His patents read like the anatomy of the automobile. In 1893, the spray-nozzle carburetor — the float-fed atomizer that remained the basis of carburetion for the better part of a century. In 1900, the honeycomb radiator, which solved engine cooling and gave the car its face. In between, the Phoenix: four cylinders cast in one block, designed in the ballroom of a defunct hotel after DMG's financiers had pushed both him and Daimler out.
That exile says everything about the partnership. Denied a board seat in 1891, Maybach resigned; Daimler quietly paid his salary and set him up with seventeen workers in the Hermann Hotel. When a British license deal required both men back in 1895, they returned together. They always did.
Then came the commission that ended the nineteenth century. Emil Jellinek — DMG's flamboyant dealer in Nice, who scrawled demands on his shirt cuffs and had his secretary post them to Maybach — wanted a car that existed nowhere: “I don't want a car for today or tomorrow, it will be the car of the day after tomorrow.” He ordered thirty-six of them, sight unseen, for 550,000 marks — on condition it carry his daughter's name.
Daimler died in March 1900 and never saw it. Between April and December, Maybach and Paul Daimler delivered the Mercedes 35 PS: long and low on a pressed-steel frame, honeycomb radiator up front, thirty-five horsepower. At Nice Week in March 1901 it won nearly everything it entered, and the secretary-general of the Automobile Club de France wrote the sentence carved into company history: “We have entered the Mercedes era.”
Nice, March 1901
“We have entered the Mercedes era.”
Paul Meyan, Automobile Club de France
What was new
Everything at once.
Low center of gravity, pressed-steel frame, honeycomb radiator, a light 5.9-liter four — the 35 PS made every horseless carriage before it obsolete in one stroke. It is routinely called the first modern automobile.
What it was named
Mercédès.
After Jellinek's ten-year-old daughter — his racing pseudonym made flesh in steel. The name became a trademark in 1902, and then it became everything else.
Maybach, in a rare flash of pride, wrote to Jellinek later: “You and I are the inventors of the Mercedes car.”
Chapter III
Exile, and a second kingdom.
With Daimler dead, the boardroom caught up with Maybach at last. After 1903 his position was steadily undermined; the creator of the Mercedes was relieved as technical director and moved to an isolated “inventor's office” where nothing he invented was wanted. On 1 April 1907, the king of constructors walked out of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, embittered. Even Jellinek was wounded on his behalf: the blow, his son wrote, did not come unexpectedly — but it hit him hard.
The second act began at sixty-three. In 1909, with his son Karl, he founded an engine works for Count Zeppelin's airships — Maybach-Motorenbau from 1912 — with Karl as technical director and Wilhelm, contentedly, as adviser. The crown had passed within the family.
When the Versailles treaty grounded German airships, the firm pivoted to what its name still means: automobiles of absurd magnificence. The W3 appeared in 1921; the V12 Zeppelin flagships of the thirties answered Rolls-Royce in German. And in August 1929, in Wilhelm's last year, the Graf Zeppelin circled the earth powered by five of Karl's V12 engines — the orphan from the Bruderhaus, at eighty-three, listening to his son's engines fly around the world.
He died on 29 December 1929 and was buried at the Uff-Kirchhof in Bad Cannstatt — a few steps from Gottlieb Daimler, the man he had followed for forty years, reunited for good.
1885
Standuhr · The Grandfather Clock
The compact high-speed engine — 600 rpm when rivals managed 180 — that made the vehicle engine possible. It powered the first motorcycle, and Maybach test-rode it himself.
1901
Mercedes 35 PS · The first modern car
Long, low, pressed-steel frame, honeycomb radiator — designed in eight months for Emil Jellinek and named after his daughter. Everything before it suddenly looked like a carriage.
1930
Zeppelin DS8 · The V12 flagship
The eight-liter V12 limousine of the company he founded with his son Karl — German luxury's answer to Rolls-Royce, named for the airships their engines carried around the world.
He created the foundations of modern motoring — and rarely used a car for himself. Though he could easily have afforded one, his biographer records, Wilhelm Maybach walked, or took the tram.
The constructor's ledger.
From making Otto's four-stroke producible to a V12 with his name on the grille.
1876
Deutz
Otto four-stroke made producible
1883
Dream
High-speed petrol engine, with Daimler
1885
Standuhr
The Grandfather Clock engine
1889
Stahlrad
First ground-up Daimler car
1893
Jet
Spray-nozzle carburetor patent
1894
Phoenix
Pioneering inline-four
1900
Radiator
Honeycomb radiator patent
1901
35 PS
The first Mercedes
1903
60 hp
Gordon Bennett winner
1909
Zeppelin
Airship engines, with Karl
1921
W3
The first Maybach automobile
1930
DS8
Zeppelin V12 flagship
Epilogue
The name outlived the man twice.
The honors came late and quietly, like him: an honorary doctorate from Stuttgart in 1916, the VDI's Grashof Medal in 1922 for “this epoch-making design engineer,” the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1996. His company became MTU; and in 2002 Daimler revived Maybach as its ultra-luxury marque — reborn again in 2014 as Mercedes-Maybach, the two halves of his life's work finally sharing a badge.
The deeper legacy is simpler. The car in front of you — any car — carries his ideas: an engine fed by an atomizing carburetor's descendants, cooled by a radiator, arranged low and long the way the 35 PS first arranged it. The orphan from Heilbronn designed the template. Everyone since has been filling it in.
“You and I are the inventors of the Mercedes car.”