Thinking Small (6 page)

Mr. Ginzkey, having full confidence in Ferdinand, set up a job for him with a company that manufactured electrical equipment and machinery. Ferdinand fell into step immediately upon starting his new job, working long hours, sometimes sneaking into classes at the Vienna Technical University at night. Ferdinand knew he had none of the usual engineering degrees expected of someone in his position at the time, but he was so good at what he did that he advanced quickly
nonetheless; people often talked of his “sixth sense.” By the time he was twenty-two, the obsessive young man had already worked his way up to becoming a company manager. He’d also started thinking more and more about the newest invention in transportation: the motor car.

Around the same time that Ferdinand Porsche had been born in 1875, Europe had experienced a turn toward industrialization, and automotive pioneers had begun developing internal combustion engines and connecting them to vehicles that were not cars so much as carts, but that were nevertheless a large step forward from the usual horse-and-carriage method of mobility. By the time Ferdinand Porsche was an adult, automobiles had come a long way: Those early
gasoline-powered carts had grown, widened, and attached themselves to four large wooden wheels.
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Now people could ride in seats on the carts and steer; they could also control their speed. Still, the majority of the population detested the motor car’s noise and its rude way of taking up the entire street. Few people took them very seriously in those early decades; few
considered them much more than an upper-class toy. The horse and carriage still ruled the roads.

But then, as the twentieth century began, the automobile began to generate more excitement and mystique, even among those who were not wealthy enough to own one. One reason for this was the establishment of the auto race in 1894: The very first one ran in France from Paris to Rouen and then from Rouen to Bordeaux. People heard about it and came out to the streets to watch and cheer. The newspapers reported on it extensively. Such races gradually became frequent,
much-anticipated events. And the motor car became a source of amusement rather than a nuisance that disturbed horses and made the streets unsafe: Particular cars or drivers took on the quality of a favorite sports team or sports figure, and the race thus became something one could participate in without having to experience firsthand.

Auto racing was exciting, but the transportation option that was having the most success in finding new customers in the 1880s was the motorcycle. In many ways, the idea of individual transportation for the masses had started not with the car, but with a two-wheeler, the bicycle. The bicycle had been popularized in Paris in the mid-1800s, and it was a natural step for many of Europe’s bicycle manufacturers to find a way for a two-wheeler to propel itself. So
began the motorcycle business.
Though auto races slowly increased people’s appreciation of the automobile, it was nevertheless the motorcycle that seemed the logical mode of transportation for everyday life, and they caught on much more quickly than cars. From 1921 to 1931 the number of motorcycles in Germany rose from 26,700 to just under 800,000. For that reason, at least in big cities like Vienna, the traditional horse-and-carriage manufacturers started
making motorcycles as well. One such place was Jacob Lohner & Co., a company that would play a big role in Ferdinand Porsche’s development. It was one of the oldest and most respected luxury coach–building establishments in the world, and the official supplier for the Imperial Majesty himself, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Motorcycles brought new business for carriage maker Jacob Lohner, and he was glad to have taken the risk of getting into the new venture. In 1896, however, seeing the demand for two-wheelers beginning to taper off, Lohner decided it was time to take an even bigger risk. He wanted to try his hand at developing the new technology of motor cars. To do so, he’d need to expand his staff. He wanted someone young, someone curious, someone who knew his way around an
electronics shop. Being friends with some of Ferdinand Porsche’s coworkers, Lohner soon heard about their unusually talented colleague from the country. Ferdinand was the perfect candidate: young, curious, and longing to try his hand at building a car. Lohner asked him if he might like to come around the shop sometime. What Lohner wanted, he told Ferdinand, was to build an electric car. Luckily, electricity was already something Ferdinand understood well.

Energy and its relation to mobility
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has long been a mysterious connection that innovators are hungry to explore. Engines are basically controlled explosions of energy; building an engine is a way of directing energy to achieve maximum force, and it comes with a compelling rush of adrenaline. Leonardo da Vinci started making drawings of self-propelled vehicles
as far back as the fifteenth century, but it was only at the turn of the twentieth century that something modestly resembling the modern automobile was
designed. In those years, men like Karl Benz, the highly respected German engineer who acquired the first patent for a gasoline-powered car in 1886, worked mainly with automobiles that used internal-combustion engines. But Lohner wanted to try using electricity. Many of the first auto races had actually been won by
using either steam or electric power, so it was still a toss-up as to which way the future would go: by no means did it look certain that the world would become oil-dependent (the petroleum industry was only just getting started, and that industry was certainly not dependent on cars). Lohner chose electric power because he had the Imperial Majesty to consider. Being the official supplier for the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s transportation, if he was going to make a car, it had
better be regal. That meant something quiet and clean, something worthy of being taken to a theater premiere or a state dinner. The messy, noisy, internal-combustion engine simply would not do. He discussed all this with the young man from Maffersdorf, who had never built a car, but was anxious to try. Lohner hired him, and they set to work. From that moment on, Ferdinand Porsche’s main obsession would be the automobile. It was the first step on the path that would eventually
lead to the creation of the Bug.

Adolf Hitler,
a man that history will forever link to Germany, was not a German citizen by birth. Like Ferdinand Porsche, he was born in a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the eldest son of a well-respected Austrian customs official. By the time he arrived in the world, born in Braunau am Inn in 1889, fourteen years after Ferdinand Porsche’s birth, the industrial-age Eiffel Tower was being built
and industrialization was slightly less alien to most Europeans than it had been a decade before; the automobile was slowly gaining ground. The first official
auto race would occur when Hitler was five years old, and though his family would have been familiar with the idea of automobiles, they would nevertheless have been a very unlikely sight in their town.

From early on, Adolf was a troubled boy. When he was still a child, his younger brother and playmate Edmund died, causing a noticeable change in the family and further heartbreak for his mother Klara, who had already lost three children. Adolf, now her only son, wasn’t a “mother’s boy” in the traditional sense, but by all reports the two were sincerely close. “I never witnessed a closer attachment,”
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the family doctor, a Jewish man named Eduard Bloch, would later write.

As Adolf grew, he would seem at first to be a meek boy, yelled at and beaten often by his father, coddled by his mother, neither popular nor unpopular at school. Once the family moved to Linz, considered by some to be the most German city in the empire, Hitler was attracted to the popularized Pan-German ideas, ideas that discriminated against Czechs and others who did not speak German as their first tongue. He also identified with the Schönerer lifestyle, a
movement that advised boys to restrain from sexual relations until at least the age of twenty-five, and warned them away from drinking alcohol, smoking, or eating red meat. In these same years, Adolf became rather obsessed with the Native American tales of the German author Karl May. Likewise, he was entranced by stories his history teacher told him of a mythologized German past, and men such as Frederick the Great. The stories impacted him deeply; he would talk of May and of
Frederick the Great for the rest of his life. As he grew into an adolescent, this fantasy life would only expand. By the time he reached his teenage years, he had decided that he was destined to become a great artist and would consider doing nothing else. He and his father quarreled violently over this, and in rebellion, Adolf no longer tried hard at his studies and his grades suffered. This only caused more beatings from his father. His mother demurred and did not stand in her
husband’s way.

As Hitler struggled through his adolescence, Ferdinand Porsche was in Jacob Lohner’s workshop designing his first car. Around Hitler’s eleventh birthday, Ferdinand Porsche presented his creation at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. It would be Ferdinand’s inaugural visit to the French capital, his first time mingling with people from all over Europe. The event drew in millions, one of the first large-scale shows about technology ever held. Engineers
and scientists were ecstatic about it, coming from many European countries to attend, showing off not only cars but also inventions such as escalators and talking films. Excitement was in the air, and so was controversy. The Eiffel Tower seemed the perfect metaphor for the age of industry breaking upon the world: While some loved the structure, others protested that it was an ugly monument to all that was wrong with industrialization. And yet technical progress was a fever that could
not be cooled; its seductiveness was evident in the way even the most anti-industry of voices could not help but be awed when standing outside the Paris Exhibition at night: It was the first of its kind to be electrically lit.

At Lohner & Co., the past few years had been exciting but difficult. Ferdinand Porsche’s trial-and-error method had cost Jacob quite a lot of money: Each time one idea of Porsche’s failed, he was quick to adjust and come up with a new idea that he just
had
to test. Lohner somehow found a way to grit his teeth and stick with the young man, and by the time of the Paris Exhibition, his patience was indeed paying off. The Lohner-Porsche car was
the automotive star of the show; European newspapers wrote that it was the most outstanding innovation there.

It’s easy to see why people made such a fuss. The car really is beautiful—primitive-looking by contemporary standards, with its big wooden wheels, its uncovered seating, and its tall, thin steering wheel—but the design is elegant and neat, streamlined with a little wave of steel at its front. The car was perfectly balanced
and poised, exactly the kind of thing to be taken to the theater by an emperor or a queen: It was quiet
because it had no transmission or layshafts, working instead with little electrical engines that were connected directly to the wheels. And it could travel 50 miles at 9 mph before its batteries needed to be recharged. Even today, such a construction would seem a unique and splendid thing. It was awarded a grand prize for its design. Ferdinand had been only twenty-three years old at the time he’d created the car’s design. “He is very young,”
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Jacob Lohner told the crowd in Paris, “but he’s a man with quite a career ahead of him. You’ll certainly hear of him again.” And indeed, that was just the beginning. Over the next two years, Porsche
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would build the world’s
first hybrid as well as a car called “Mixt,” which used a mix of electric and internal-combustion engines. Both these cars were extraordinary and unprecedented. In the following years, Porsche would also design the first front-wheel- and the first four-wheel-drive automobile. In 1902, Porsche won the most prestigious medal in Austrian engineering, the Pöttinger, for his work. He had truly left the Austrian countryside
and was now moving toward
fame. In contrast, Hitler’s move to Vienna did not go nearly so well.