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Maybach

Full Name: Wilhelm Maybach

Achievements: Invented the spray carburettor; chief designer of the first Mercedes automobiles (1900-01).

Born: February 9, 1846; Heilbronn, Württemberg [Germany]

Died: December 29, 1929; Stuttgart, Germany (Aged 83)

Field & Discipline: Engineering

Language: German

Father:: Christian Carl Maybach (1813-56)

Mother: Louise Barbara Dannwolf (1814-54)

Siblings: Unknown

Spouse: Bertha Wilhelmine Habermaas (1851-1931, married 1878)

Children: 2 sons (including Karl, 1879-1960); 1 daughter

Education: Unknown

Major Work:

"Zur Geschichte des Automobilmotors" ("On the History of Automobile Engines"; 1915)

Life & Times:

In 1861 Maybach  was apprenticed as a draughtsman at the Bruderhaus Engineering Works in Reutlingen.  In 1863, [worked with] Daimler* arrived as the new manager and over the following six years Daimler and Maybach formed a close working relationship. Through Daimler's influence, Maybach attended evening classes at Reutlingen's College of Further Education and completed his apprenticeship early, in 1865.

He was then appointed manager of the machine works (under Daimler's directorship), and in 1869, he moved with Daimler to a firm of machine builders at Karlsruhe.  During the 1860s, [worked for] Otto* had developed his atmospheric engine and reorganized his company, and Daimler was appointed technical director in 1872.

Daimler immediately hired Maybach as his chief designer, and for the next decade Maybach worked as a partner on the design and performance of high-speed gas engines. During this period, in 1875, Maybach also constructed his first petrol-fuelled engine, but this proved relatively unsuccessful.

In 1881, after a dispute with Otto, Daimler left the Deutz Company to work as a freelance inventor at Bad Cannstatt, a suburb of Stuttgart, where he began experimenting with petrol-fuelled engines. Maybach joined him there in April 1882, and the pair set up a factory in Stuttgart, with Maybach as engineer and designer, to develop lightweight high-speed, petrol-fuelled engines for road vehicles.  

The first productive oil well had been drilled by [influenced by] Edwin Drake* in the U.S. in 1859, and immediately great interest had been aroused in the potential for oil and petrol as engine-fuel. A petrol-fuelled engine was first developed by an Austrian engineer, Julius Hock, in 1870,  but its power was very low, and fuel consumption enormous. 

Maybach almost immediately improved Hock's design for a 24-horsepower engine,  with mechanical inlet valves that could be throttled by the operator. By 1880, the fastest gas engines were still only operating at between 150 and 250 rpm, but within a year (1883) Maybach and Daimler had constructed and patented an air-cooled, single-cylinder engine with a cast-iron flywheel which ran at 900 rpm.

The reason for the success of this first efficient [first practical version of]  internal-combustion engine* was Maybach's development of several new components, particularly the surface carburetor, a prototype device for vaporizing the petrol and then supplying the engine with a mixture of fuel and air,  based on the principle of the venturi tube, developed by the Italian physicist [influenced by] Venturi a century earlier. 

Maybach used the venturi tube to draw petrol from the main fuel jet into the air stream at a rate related to the air flow,  controlling the amount of fuel and air released to the engine.  

Over the next two years, Maybach continued to make improvements and in 1885 Daimler and Maybach patented a relatively light 0.4k W (0.5 hp) four-stroke engine. A motor cycle driven by this engine appeared in November 1885, and a modified horse-drawn carriage was fitted with a Maybach engine in 1886.

Other applications to small boats (1887), fire-engine pumps, small locomotives and even an airship (1888) followed.

Then, in 1889, Maybach and Daimler produced two more four-wheeled vehicles, this time designed from the drawing board as automobiles. The first was a light four-wheeler with a tubular frame and a vertical, single-cylinder, water-cooled engine in the rear, featuring a novel four-speed gear transmission to the rear wheels and a water-cooling mechanism circulating throughout the frame, acting as a radiator.

Their [developed] automobile* had many of the above features, but also a belt drive and a vee-twin engine, with a top speed of 11 mph, and was shown at the Paris exhibition of 1889 with great success.  

In 1890, Maybach and Daimler founded the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft at Cannstatt to manufacture automobiles, the first Daimler-produced luxury car having been sold to the sultan of Morocco in 1889.  In 1893, Maybach produced his spray-nozzle or float-feed carburetor.

In this new, greatly improved carburetor, again based on the venturi principle, an adjusting screw controlled the rate of maximum fuel flow and a second screw varied the area of the choke; when the inlet valve was opened, air sent along the choke passage caused a drop in pressure, making the fuel enter through a jet as a fine spray, and the vaporized fuel then mixed with air to produce a combustible mixture for the engine's cylinders.

In 1899, Maybach was approached by Emil Jellinek (later changed his name to [collaborated with] Jellinek-Mercedes*), Austro-Hungarian consul in Nice and Daimler agent in France, who wanted a car to compete with those of Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor, who (using a Daimler engine within a radically new automobile design) had won the 730-mile Paris-Bordeaux race in 1895. 

Jellinek wanted more power with a lower center of gravity, and the result was Maybach's 35 hp Daimler-Simplex automobile of 1901, whose performance and road-holding beat those of all other automobiles of the time. Jellinek was so pleased with the car that he immediately placed an order for 36 cars, which he named after his daughter, Mercedes.   

In 1899 Maybach had begun to work also for [worked for] Zeppelin*, placing Daimler engines in Zeppelin's airships, and after Daimler's death in 1900 he continued to develop the Mercedes car and the Zeppelin Airship.

Extra Connections: He may have been inspired by antiseptic sprays such as that developed by [possibly influenced by] Lister*.

Assessment: His carburettor  made a major contribution to automobile development

Oneliner: Wilhelm Maybach, carburetor inventor and Mercedes designer

Bibliography:

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