1、Automobile Design Twelve Great Designers and Their Work Second Edition Edited By: Ronald Barker and Anthony HardingAUTOMOBILE DESIGN Twelve Great Designers and Their Work Second Edition SAE Historical Series Edited by Ronald Barker and Anthony Harding Published by: Society of Automotive Engineers, I
2、nc. 400 Commonwealth Drive Warrendale, PA 15096-0001 Copyright 1992 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc. eISBN: 978-0-7680-3530-8First published as Automobile Design: Great Designers and Their Work by David but how could one compress the character and achievements of a man like Ferdinand Porsche wi
3、thin such narrow confines? So I then approached Anthony Harding, who had been respon- sible for the publication of many good books on motoring over the previous twenty years. Together, we drew up a list of prospective sub- jects, deliberately omitting some whose work had already been widely recorded
4、 while including others less well known but perhaps more colourful to deepen the perspective. It would have been presumptuous and contentious, in any case, to have picked out those whom we per- sonally considered the greatest or most significant. Men like Adam Opel and Wilhelm Maybach of Germany, He
5、nry Ford and the Stanley broth- ers of the USA, Herbert Austin, W.O. Bentley and Georges Roesch of England, Louis Renault and Ettore Bugatti of France, Vincenzo Lancia of Italy and many more, would certainly have qualified under this title. Our objective was to portray designers as people, where pos
6、sible giving as much emphasis to their backgrounds and characters as to their careers and creations. But in some cases any amount of research could produce little about the man himselfmaybe because he was colourless or reserved as a personality and expressed himself lucidly only through his work, or
7、 perhaps because the years had swallowed up his associates and friends and no one could be found to provide personal reminiscence or open up family records. This is a truly international collection, including a British subject of Greco-Bavarian origins born in Turkey, a Swiss whose cars were man- uf
8、actured in Spain, France and under license in Czechoslovakia, an Austrian whose working life was spent mostly in Czechoslovakia, and a Bohemian who became a Czech but whose product proliferated in Austria and Germany, and for this new edition we have added an Italian, Dante Giacosa, whose creations
9、have also been produced in factories far beyond the bounds of his own country, including segments of the now disintegrated Eastern bloc. I noted when the First Edition was prepared that, of the two American 1314 INTRODUCTION authors (Borgeson and Sloniger), one has a Lebanese wife and lived in Franc
10、e, the other a Czech-born wife and a home in Germany. Our Dutch author, Kousbroek, with his American wife, is domiciled in Holland, and the late Jacques Ickx represents Belgium. Hendry is a New Zealander, de la Via Spanish, and the rest of us are English. With fourteen writers (including two collabo
11、rating pairs), there was no ques- tion of maintaining any consistency in style or material even had this seemed desirable, so no unitary thread joins one chapter with the next. When you have read the chapter by Jacques Ickx, that master of painstaking research and analysis complemented by philosophi
12、c deduc- tion, you may come to realise that father Bolle was the true father also of the motorcar as a means of independent transport for individuals. He was by no means a pioneer in the use of steam for road transport, but he did foresee the need for relatively small, rapid vehicles in which people
13、 could drive themselves and their families about the country, where they wished and when they pleased, without dependence on set routes and timetables. He was as much concerned with controls and controllability as with the power plant, applying his thoughts to new suspension techniques and steering
14、systems, to versatile and trouble-free transmissions, and to bringing the entire operation of the vehicle, other than stoking the fire, under the control of the driver. Every one of the Bolle steamers had independent front suspension of one sort or another. He tried front engines, back engines and t
15、win amidships engines. He even built a steam road-and-rail track car with four-wheel drive, four- wheel steering, all-independent suspensionand even a steam servo to assist the clutch and steering. As with so many other prolific and far- sighted inventors, he was years ahead of his time, and I share
16、 Jacques Ickxs view that his work has never received the appreciation and rec- ognition it deserves. Who else qualified to write about Frederick Lanchester than the late Anthony Bird? Although he never met the great Dr Fred, for many years he enjoyed a close friendship with brother George, who helpe
17、d to build the first car to bear their name in 1895, and for some years he ran one of their 1903 tiller-steered carsthe one with two crankshafts and six connecting-rods for its two pistons. Dr Fred paid little heed to what other manufacturers were doing. He worked things out for himself from first p
18、rinciples and, like Bolle, was just as concerned with the frame structure, balance and manageability of his machines as with their means of propulsion. His designs were initially too unconventional for wide public acceptance, and subsequently became a bit outdated and old hat. Although he backed out of direct car manufacture around 1910 and applied his intellectual genius to other sciences, he continued to con-
