From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian
HANS LEDWINKA: Hardly a name that comes tripping off the tongue, but were it not for the fickleness of history his might have been the household name rather than that of Porsche.
Hans Ledwinka was born in 1878 in Klosterneuberg near Vienna. Following his schooling he became a mechanic at the Waggonfabrik Ignaz Schustala at Nesseldorf in Moravia.
There he redesigned the transmission of a 5hp Benz prototype car in 1897 which had been designed in the first place by Edmund Rumpler, himself already an established and famous engineer.
The following year, Rumpler left the firm and Ledwinka, barely 20 years of age, found himself in charge of engineering for the company.
Shortly afterwards he designed and built a racing car for a close friend of Carl Benz. With pneumatic tyres, a water pump and water-heated carburettor, it bristled with innovative features. Between then and 1917 Ledwinka continued to design for the company, but left that year for Steyr, which was intent on setting up car manufacture at the end of the war.
Ledwinka produced many interesting designs at Steyr, but perhaps the most outstanding was his six-cylinder engine which became the model for students of engineering for many years.
Swing-axles, centre or back-bone chassis, three-point mounting of engine and transmission and his own form of 4-wheel braking were all innovations introduced by Ledwinka during his time with Steyr.
It is even said that Ferdinand Porsche took a position with Steyr for a year just to learn about Ledwinka's swing-axle suspension.
In 1921 Ledwinka returned to the Waggonfabrik Ignaz Schustala company - now called Tatra after the mountain range in the east of that country - and located in Czechoslovakia. His first design for Tatra was shown at Prague in 1923 and caused an immediate stir for it turned accepted engineering and mechanical orthodoxy of the time on its head!
His classic Type 11 was to have profound influence on future trends. This 'go anywhere' car was ideal for the appalling roads of central Europe at this time and helped establish Ledwinka. It is said that travelling many thousands of miles in one of these cars was what convinced Adolf Hitler that the VW should be air-cooled.
Ledwinka moved on to design the T-77 and T-80 and, now convinced of the superiority of air-cooled engines, he placed the power unit at the rear to provide better traction and less noise.
Today the T-77 still looks startling, and one can only imagine its impact when it first appeared in 1934. This was the first commercial application of advanced thinking in aerodynamics and its top speed of 100 mph meant that it was one of the first cars built expressly to take advantage of the growing network of motorways in Europe. Remarkably, his 1937 design, the T-97 was very similar in concept to another car being developed at that time in nearby Germany- the Volkswagen.
This turned out to be Ledwinka's last design for Tatra as on October 10th 1938, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.
Ledwinka survived the war, but was imprisoned by the Russians for six years on trumped up charges of collaboration. Banished by the Russians from Czechoslovakia, Ledwinka lived with his son who had become chief engineer with Steyr-Daimler-Puch (being responsible for the Steyr 700 and Haflinger cross-country vehicle). A court case for infringement of Tatra developments was settled out-of-court by VW, but Ledwinka received no compensation, and although his friend Felix Wankel offered to finance the cost of an action, Ledwinka did not take up the offer.
Hans Ledwinka, gifted engineer and innovative thinker, died in 1967, just a few days after his 89th birthday.