Community Magazine April 2013

Absent from American record books is the name of an inventor of enormous importance to contemporary civilization, Siegfried Marcus. Machines employing the inventions of Siegfried Marcus can be numbered in the billions. Trucks and buses, automobiles and lawnmowers, motorboats and chainsaws – in fact, every mechanism employing a combustion motor and its carburetor, magneto ignition, and spark plugs – has its roots in patents granted to Marcus. These represent but a few of the 158 significant inventions known to have been brought into the world by this technological prodigy. The fact that so many industrial and communication innovations are attributable to this German-Jewish genius makes even more remarkable the rarity of the appearance of his name. After all, this was the man who paved the way for the automobile, and so, you could say, was one of the architects of 20th-century life. What Happened? Siegfried Liepmann Marcus was born in 1831 in Mecklenberg in North Germany, where his father was a businessman and head of the local Jewish community. Marcus became an apprentice machinist at the age of 12, and five years later he joined the Siemens and Halske engineering firm. They erected Europe’s first long-distance telegraph line, and Marcus designed a telegraph relay system for them. It was his first of many important inventions. As early as the 1860s, Siegfried Marcus had suggested the petroleum distillate Benzine – called gasoline in America and petrol in Britain – as a suitable fuel. Marcus built his first automobile in 1864, a vehicle that was powered by a one-cylinder internal-combustion engine. In 1870, Marcus attached a petroleum two-stroke engine to a conventional wooden handcart. Although the vehicle no longer exists, documents and photographs confirm the early date. It was the world’s first mobile internal combustion engine. Marcus also invented the mechanism required to ignite the engine’s mixture of liquid fuel and air. An 1883 patent taken out for his Wiener Zünder ignition device makes mention of “carburating air,” thus giving rise to the modern word carburetor. The Legacy of Siegfried Marcus Siegfried Marcus died in 1898, and for the next 40 years, Austrian school children were taught as a matter of course that Marcus was the inventor of the motorcar. However, following Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938, most of Marcus’ papers were destroyed by the Nazis, who were unable to accept that a Jew had made such an important discovery. As a result, the legacy of Siegfried Marcus was all but expunged. Book publishers were ordered to take his name out of all encyclopedias and replace it with the names of German car inventors Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz (photocopies of these instructions still exist). History books therefore record Daimler and Benz as the inventors of the car. Another reason Marcus is not given credit as the inventor of the car is that he never registered a patent for his automobile inventions, and he dismantled his original car. Although Marcus invented all the elements that made the combustion engine a viable reality; and although he successfully road-tested his first primitive automobile in 1864; and although he produced updated and very sophisticated versions between 1864 and 1882 – Marcus never applied for a patent for an automobile. Ever unsatisfied, Marcus continued through the next decade to refine his carburetor, his magneto ignition, and to devise an effective system of transmission. Absorbed in other projects, Marcus did not return to his invention until 10 years later. His next vehicle, with a remarkably advanced electrical system, is preserved in the Technical Museum for Industry and Trade in Vienna, and is probably the oldest gasoline- powered automobile extant. Because Marcus was a Jew, museum authorities had to hide the vehicle to prevent its destruction during the Nazi occupation. In 1949–50 it was overhauled and driven at about five miles per hour. The elements of these remarkable vehicles remain the essential guts of every gasoline-powered automobile to the present day! Marcus held about 76 patents (though none on his automobiles) in about a dozen countries. He also invented an electric lamp (1877), various other electrical devices, and a carburetor. It is no wonder that Siegfried Marcus is regarded as one of the most influential inventors of all time! The Legacy of SiegfriedMarcus JewishInventor Siegfried Marcus (1831-1898) Siegfried Marcus is regarded as one of the most influential inventors of all time. His invention of the combustion-engined automobile revolutionized the transportation industry. But his place in history was all but erased during the Nazi era because he was a Jew. and Innovator World’s First Automobile Siegfried Marcus finished his first car some 15 years before the better-known efforts of Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler. 70 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE