–Ferdinand Porsche on designing the Volkswagen
Witold Rybczynski at Literary Hub: The car I bought in Hamburg had distinctive oval German export license plates, and an international registration sticker marked with a D, for Deutschland. As I drove through Holland on my way to Paris, more than once when asking for directions I received dirty looks, especially from older persons for whom the wartime German occupation was a living memory.
And, after all, my car’s godfather was Adolf Hitler himself. Opening the 1933 Berlin Motor Show as the newly appointed reich chancellor, he had announced a national policy to motorize Germany, which despite having invented the automobile a half century earlier, lagged other European countries in car ownership. Hitler called on the auto industry to produce an affordable people’s car, a volkswagen.
The automotive engineer who would realize Hitler’s vision was not a German native. Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951) was born in the small Bohemian market town of Maffersdorf in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after the First World War, he would become a citizen of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. Young Porsche worked in his father’s tinsmith shop and attended evening classes at the local polytechnic college. The boy was fascinated by electricity, and built his own generator, making the Porsche home the first in town to have electric light.
At the age of eighteen, thanks to the recommendation of a local businessman, the precocious youngster was apprenticed to Béla Egger, a Viennese manufacturer of electrical equipment. Four years later, Egger began a collaborative project to develop an electric automobile with Jacob Lohner & Company, an established luxury coach builder. Porsche, who had risen in the company, was charged with the design of the motor and drivetrain.
At the time that Egger and Lohner started their project, it was far from clear which motive power was best suited to the automobile: steam, gas-fired internal combustion, or electricity. Many argued for steam, which had the advantage of being a tried and true technology—after all, James Watt’s steam engine dated from 1776—and steam had been used to power tractors, omnibuses, and fire trucks since the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were steam engines safe and reliable, and mechanically straightforward, but steam could be produced by burning kerosene, which—unlike gasoline—was widely available.
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