Hub van Doorne

Hubert Jozef Hub van Doorne (1900 to 1979) was a Dutch industrialist who, together with his brother Willem, known as Wim, founded the trailer and truck manufacturer DAF Trucks. Born in the small Dutch town of America in Limburg, the son of a blacksmith, he apprenticed at a machine factory in Eindhoven, worked as a chauffeur-mechanic, set up a metalworking business in 1920 that he gave up after four years, and returned to the Mandiger factory as company manager. In April 1928 he went back into self-employment with a metal manufacturing and repair business that turned increasingly to trailers and was renamed Van Doorne's Aanhangwagenfabriek in 1932, later becoming Van Doorne's Automobielfabriek as it moved into trucks and, during the Second World War, military vehicles. Hub kept responsibility for the technical and engineering side while Wim handled finance and administration, and it was Hub who developed and applied the continuously variable transmission, a belt drive between two adjustable coned pulleys, sold as the Variomatic in small DAF cars.