Felix Wankel
| Felix Wankel | |
|---|---|
Wankel in the 1960s
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| Born |
13 August 1902 Lahr, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Empire |
| Died | 9 October 1988 (aged 86) Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Spouse(s) | Emma "Mi" Kirn |
| Children | none |
| Parent(s) | Gerty Wankel and Rudolf Wankel |
| Engineering career | |
| Discipline | Mechanical engineering |
| Institutions | Paki, Reich Air Ministry, Goetze AG, NSU, Wankel GmbH |
| Projects | Wankel engine |
Felix Heinrich Wankel (13 August 1902 – 9 October 1988) was a German mechanical engineer and inventor after whom the Wankel engine was named.
Wankel was born in 1902 in Lahr in what was then the Grand Duchy of Baden in the Upper Rhine Plain of present-day southwestern Germany. He was the only son of Gerty Wankel (née Heidlauff) and Rudolf Wankel, a forest assessor. His father fell in World War I. Thereafter, the family moved to Heidelberg. He went to high schools in Donaueschingen, Heidelberg, and Weinheim, and left school without Abitur in 1921. He learned the trade of purchaser at the Carl Winter Press in Heidelberg and worked for the publishing house until June 1926. He and some friends had already run an unofficial afterwork machine shop in a backyard shed in Heidelberg since 1924. Wankel now determined to receive unemployment benefits and to focus on the machine shop. One of his friends, who had graduated from university, gave his name and transformed the shop into an official garage for DKW and Cleveland motor bikes in 1927, where Wankel worked from time to time until his arrest in 1933.
Wankel was gifted since childhood with an ingenious spatial imagination, and became interested in the world of machines, especially combustion engines. After his mother was widowed, Wankel could not afford university education or even an apprenticeship; however, he was able to teach himself technical subjects. At age 17, he told friends that he had dreamt of constructing a car with "a new type of engine, half turbine, half reciprocating. It is my invention!". True to this prediction, he conceived the Wankel engine in 1924 and won his first patent in 1929.
During the early 1920s Wankel was a member of various radical right-wing and anti-Semitic organizations. In 1921 he joined the Heidelberg branch of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund and in 1922 he became a member of the NSDAP, which was banned soon afterwards. Wankel founded and led youth groups associated with a cover-up organization of the NSDAP. With them he conducted paramilitary training, scouting games and night walks. Whereas his high esteem for technical innovations was not widely shared among the German Youth Movement, he was offered the opportunity to talk about the issue of technology and education to Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists in 1928.
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