Engineers
Gottlieb Daimler
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Gottlieb Daimler was a German engineer who, with his partner Wilhelm Maybach, fitted a high speed internal combustion engine to a modified stagecoach in 1886, the same year as Karl Benz's purpose built vehicle, working independently and without ever meeting Benz. Daimler and Maybach's engine work, rather than Benz's chassis, went on to power the Mercedes marque.
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Cross-Tradition Connections
Held Differently
The Automobile, Inventions Why this is disputed. Daimler and Maybach developed a four wheeled motorized carriage the same year as Benz, working independently; Benz's earlier patent filing and purpose built chassis are why he alone is usually named first.
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Invented: The Automobile
Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler produced their automobiles independently of each other in 1886, working in German towns about sixty miles apart with no evidence of collaboration or shared knowledge of the other's project. Benz filed his patent application for a purpose-built three-wheeled "automobile fueled by gas" on 29 January 1886 and is consequently the figure usually named first and alone as the automobile's inventor. Daimler, working with Wilhelm Maybach, instead motorized an existing stagecoach-style carriage the same year; because his vehicle was a converted horse-drawn design rather than one engineered from the ground up as a motor vehicle, most popular accounts read it as a parallel achievement rather than the founding one, a distinction historians of Daimler's own work regard as arbitrary given how close the two efforts ran.
A dissenting reading, from Historians of Daimler and Maybach's 1886 vehicleWikipedia contributors, Gottlieb Daimler (Wikipedia), Wikimedia Foundation
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