User:Resident Mario/Mercedes-Benz

Mercedes-Benz is a major German automobile manufacturer, producing automobiles, buses, coaches, and trucks. The origins of the company dates back to the mid 1880s, with separate advances by Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, and continues to this very day.

Origins
The history of Mercedes Benz begins with those of its founders, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, now considered the founding fathers of the automobile. Despite working in the same field just 60 mi apart, the two never met; by the time their companies merged to form Daimler-Benz in 1906, Daimler was deceased, and his place was taken by pupil Wilhelm Maybach, himself a legendary figure. Although they were unknowingly working towards a common goal, the two men were approaching it from a different angle: while Benz worked on the creation of the first "proper" automobile, Daimler concentrated on designing an efficient combustion engine and power source.

Benz
Karl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1844. When Benz was just 2 years old, his father died in a train accident; his mother, Josephine Vaillant, changed his name to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father. Despite living near poverty, his mother pressed for Benz's education. After graduating from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and several years of professional training, Benz took a job at a local locomotive factory as a draftsman. In 1882, Benz founded his own machine shop in Mannheim with August Ritter; however Benz was a poor businessman, and the partnership proving unreliable, he broke away in October 1883 to form Benz & Cie..

Benz began experimenting with gasoline engines soon after forming his own company. At the time, gasoline was in use as a cleaning fluid and or lighting. Motorists wishing to use it as a fuel generally had to buy it in cans at local grocery stores, severely hampering its use. Seeing it as the fuel of the future, Benz developed a single-cylinder, four-stroke engine with a total displacement of just 0.954 l, exceptionally lightweight for the time. The design included a countetweighed crankshaft, electric ignition, water cooling, an open crankcase, and a spark coil for ignition. An interesting feature is the engine's large horizontal flywheel&mdash;Benz feared that the gyroscopic effect of vertical arrangement would interfere with the vehicle's stability. It was meant to be mounted under the driver's seat, and a strong pull was used to start the engine. It also had a special surface carburettor that doubled as a 4.5 l fuel tank. Fuel composition was determined by a sleeve valve.

Despite its advanced design, the engine had several major shortcomings, and was problematic in operation. It had minimal gasoline storage capacity and high fuel consumption, and indeed was only meant to act as a "demonstration" that the concept was feasible. In addition it offloaded heat through surface evaporation of water, a design that, albeit simple, cast off large amounts of water and was inefficient at higher engine speeds. This unit developed a peak output of 0.55 kW at 400 RPM, well ahead of competitors.

Patent Motor Car

Daimler
Gottlieb Daimler was born in Schorndorf, Germany, in 1834. The son of a baker, Daimler took up mechanical engineering when he was 1852. In 1872, at the age of 32, he began working at Deutz-AG-Gasmotorenfabrik, the world's largest motor manufacturer at the time. There and his protegee Wilhelm Maybach, were involved in the development of the primitive four-stroke engine. After leaving over personal differences with the company's co-founder, Nikolaus Otto, Daimler retired to his estate in Stuttgart, where he and Maybach began working on a more efficient version of Otto's gasoline engine.

Daimler chose to base his system on the four-stroke concept he worked on with Otto at Deutz, knowing fully well that his former boss had already patented it. Daimler completed and patented his first four-cylinder, single-stroke gasoline engine in 1883. A big problem at the time was igniting such a high-capacity system, a problem Maybach solved by applying hot-tube ignition to the system. With a speed of 600 rotations per minute (rpm), the design was far ahead of its time, as most of the systems of the day could only manage around 120 and at most just under 200. The essential design criteria had been met, but the engine still needed some work to be truly efficient.

His next innovation was the "Grandfather Clock," an upright and improved version of his 1883 engine so named for its distinctive appearance. Daimler patented the engine on April 3rd, 1885. Spinning at 700 rpm, it featured several major improvements over his earlier design, including an enclosed crankcase, an air-cooled cylinder, a "snifting" intake valve that used vacuum pressure, and an exhaust valve operated by a curved groove, invented by Daimler, meant to keep engine revolutions in check. Lastly the engine featured a floating carburetor, Maybach's invention, allowing easier gas combustion. The Grandfather clock achieved an rotations per minute (rpm) rate of 600, whereas most such engines of the day could not even manage 200. In comparison to Benz's design, the engine had an output of 0.75 hp, 0.35 hp less the the 1.1 hp Grandfather engine. In addition the engine's compact size made it the first engine small enough to be practically fitted as an automobile motor.

Like Benz, Daimler did not immediatly make the jump to four wheels. Instead, the grandfather clock was first used on a heavily modified bicycle dubbed the "Daimler riding car," allowing the vehicle to reach 7 mi per hour. Power was transmitted using a drive belt encircling the rear wheel, and Daimler's son Adolf rode the vehicle, the world's first motorcycle. along a 3 km stretch without problems.

Following his success with the motorcycle, in 1886 Daimler ordered a horse-drawn coach from Wimpf & Son, a local coach-builder, and outfitted it with a Grandfather engine. The engine was mounted centrally ahead of the rear seat bench, and was was lighter then previous units as well. The vehicle used a radical new power transmission; a belt pulley system attached to a crankshaft drove sprockets on either side, which in turn powered mounted gears in the rear wheels. Instead of a differential, a friction-driven clutch was used. Daimler used it on his excursions to Esslingen and Stuttgart, drawing wide-eyed audiences at what appeared at the time to be two men out for a drive in their carriage, having apparently forgotten their horse. Although some passerby were deeply suspicious, the design's success definitively proved the ability of a combustion engine to the two men. In 1887 he further modified it to use water-cooled heat dispersion, and in 1888 he applied for a driver's permit using the vehicle&mdash;the world's first automotive driver's license.