A car man catches the flying bug

Edmund Rumpler came to aeroplanes from cars. Born in Vienna in 1872, he had worked with Hans Ledwinka on the first Tatra car, served as technical director at Adler, and in 1903 patented a swing-axle rear suspension later taken up by others. The Wright brothers changed his course. In August 1906 he opened an engineering office in Berlin, and on 10 November 1908 added an aircraft department, Edmund Rumpler Luftfahrzeugbau; within months it had become a limited company. From 1910 it worked from a building on the northern edge of the Johannisthal airfield, Berlin’s cradle of flight.

Etrich’s dove, Rumpler’s name

Its first hit was borrowed. On 10 October 1910 the Etrich-Rumpler Taube, a licence-built copy of the Austrian Igo Etrich’s bird-winged monoplane, flew at Johannisthal. Etrich’s name soon vanished from the paperwork; the aircraft was sold as the Rumpler Taube, and when the German patent office declined to protect the design, Rumpler stopped paying royalties. Etrich dropped his lawsuit when war broke out. The Taube made headlines regardless: on 9 July 1914 the Rumpler works pilot Guido Linnekogel took one to a world altitude record of 6,570 m, and in China Gunther Plüschow flew a Rumpler Taube over besieged Tsingtao.

Spying from 24,000 feet

The war turned Rumpler into a serious manufacturer. The C.I two-seater of 1915 served from the Western Front to Palestine and was built by four other firms under licence. A branch, the Bayerische Rumpler-Werke, opened at Augsburg in 1916 and delivered its first aircraft on 1 July 1917. Rumpler’s speciality became altitude. The C.VII Rubild photographic version could work as high as 7,300 m, carrying oxygen and electrically heated suits, and was practically immune to interception above 5,500 m. By 1918 the company employed about 3,300 people in Berlin and Augsburg, and the Berlin works alone had turned out 3,060 aircraft since 1908.

The teardrop car

Versailles banned German aircraft building, so Rumpler applied what he had learned to the road. The Tropfenwagen, or teardrop car, appeared at the Berlin motor show in September 1921: pointed at both ends, wind-tunnel tested at Göttingen, with a mid-mounted six-cylinder engine and curved glass. Tested again in the 1970s it showed a drag coefficient of 0.28, a figure to astonish later engineers. Buyers were less impressed. About 100 were built, most of them Berlin taxis, and several met a fiery end in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. Its chassis inspired the Benz Tropfenwagen racers of 1923.

A ruined name

The money ran out. The Augsburg company went bankrupt in 1923 and sold its halls to the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke on 30 July 1926, where the Bf 109 would later be born. The Berlin company stopped car production in 1925 and was wound up in 1926. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Rumpler, who was Jewish, was briefly imprisoned and his career ruined. He died in 1940, and the Nazis destroyed his records. Today a street in Augsburg, the Rumplerstrasse, marks the site of the old works.

מפעלים

• Johannisthal works · Johannisthal, Berlin — From 1910 on the northern edge of the airfield
• Bayerische Rumpler-Werke · Haunstetter Strasse, Augsburg — Founded 24 October 1916, first aircraft 1 July 1917; sold to BFW 30 July 1926

אֲנָשִׁים

• Edmund Rumpler · founder (1872–1940) — Austrian-born engineer; imprisoned by the Nazis in 1933
• Guido Linnekogel · works pilot — World altitude record of 6,570 m in a Taube, 1914
• August Riedinger · investor in the Augsburg subsidiary
• Otto Meyer · manager of the Augsburg works
• Melli Beese · student pilot, 1911 — Taken on for publicity purposes

שיאים וראשונות

• World altitude record of 6,570 m by Guido Linnekogel in a Rumpler Taube, 9 July 1914
• Tropfenwagen drag coefficient of 0.28, measured in the 1970s