Robert Bosch

Robert Bosch was a German electrical engineer and industrialist who founded a precision-mechanics and electrical-engineering workshop in Stuttgart on November 15, 1886, the company that grew into Robert Bosch GmbH. His central technical contribution was the magneto ignition system for internal combustion engines, developed from 1893 with British engineer Frederick Richard Simms and refined through the 1890s by his employees Arnold Zahringer and Gottlob Honold until it could reliably fire spark plugs at speeds up to 1,800 revolutions per minute. By January 1898 the improved magneto had won orders from automobile pioneer Gottlieb Daimler, and the technology was also adapted for Zeppelin airship engines around 1900. Bosch expanded the company internationally, and by 1913 it operated branches across the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia, generating 88 percent of its sales outside Germany; a later innovation was the diesel fuel-injection pump, introduced in 1927. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1984.