František Janeček

František Janeček was a Czech engineer and industrialist who lived from 1878 to 1941 and is best remembered as the founder of the Jawa motorcycle company. Born in Klášter nad Dědinou in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary, he studied mechanics at the Prague Technical School and at an engineering college in Berlin, then worked for the industrialist Emil Kolben, who made him manager of a new factory in the Netherlands while he was still in his early twenties. At the age of thirty-one he left to open his own workshop in Prague, where he registered dozens of patents, many of them concerned with sound recording, and developed the pneumograph, a pneumatic display of flipping black and white tiles meant to show advertisements and news on building fronts. After serving in the First World War he secured more than sixty further patents, including an improved hand grenade, the Model 21, which became the standard grenade of the Czechoslovak army. In 1927 he turned a former armament factory to motorcycles, first building Wanderer machines under licence; the company took the name Jawa in 1929, joining the first two letters of Janeček and Wanderer. The Littlejohn adaptor for the British two-pounder anti-tank gun also took its name from his.