Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > Great european inventors III

Karl Benz (Carl Benz)
The internal combustion engine

In 1885, German mechanical engineer Karl Benz designed and built the world’s first practical automobile to be powered by an internal combustion engine. Born in 1844 in Baden Muehlburg, Germany, Karl Friedrich Benz founded his first company in 1871 with partner August Ritter. The “Iron Foundry and Machine Shop” supplied building materials.

Benz began his work on a two-stroke engine, in hopes of finding a new income. He received his first patent in 1879. In 1883, he founded Benz & Company to produce industrial engines in Mannheim, Germany. He then began designing a “motor carriage”, with a four-stroke engine (based on Nicolaus Otto’s patent). Benz designed his engine (958cc, 0.75hp) and the body for the three-wheel vehicle with an electric ignition, differential gears and water-cooling. The car was first driven in Mannheim in 1885.

On 29 January 1886, he was granted a patent for his gas-fuelled automobile and in July, he began selling his automobile to the public. He went on to build his first four-wheeled car in 1891 and Benz and Company went on to become the world’s largest manufacturer of automobiles by 1900.

Alex Müller
High-temperature superconductivity

Alex Müller, along with his colleague Georg Bednorz, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in a new class of materials.

Back in the early 1980s, Müller had begun searching for substances that would become superconductive at higher temperatures. The highest critical temperature attainable at that time was about 23K. In 1983, Müller recruited Georg Bednorz to IBM, to help systematically test various oxides. A few recent studies had indicated these materials might superconduct. In 1986 the two succeeded in achieving superconductivity in a barium-lanthanum-copper oxide at a temperature of 35 K. Over the previous 75 years the critical temperature had risen from 11 K in 1911 to 23 K in 1973 where it had remained for 13 years. Thus 35 K was incredibly high by the prevailing standards of superconductivity research.

They reported their discovery in the April 1986 issue of Zeitschrift für Physik. Before the end of the year, Shoji Tanaka at the University of Tokyo and then Paul Chu at the University of Houston had each independently confirmed their result. A couple of months later, Chu went on to achieve superconductivity at the unimaginably high temperature of 93K.

In 1987, Müller and Bednorz were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics – the shortest time between the discovery and the prize award for any Nobel.