Reutlingen

Reutlingen n -s г. Ройтлинген

общ. г. Ройтлинген

Reutlingen, Germany, Reutlingen.

Reutlingen, Alemania.

gener. Reutlingen

SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of a baker, his youthful interest in technical affairs led to his being apprenticed to a gunsmith with whom he produced his apprenticeship piece: a double-barrelled pistol with a rifled barrel and "nicely chased scrollwork", for which he received high praise. He remained there until 1852 before going to technical school in Stuttgart from 1853 to 1857. He then went to a steam-engineering company in Strasbourg to gain practical experience. He completed his formal education at Stuttgart Polytechnik, and in 1861 he left to tour France and England. There he worked in the engine-shop of Smith, Peacock \& Tanner and then with Roberts \& Co., textile machinery manufacturers of Manchester. He later moved to Coventry to work at Whitworths, and it was in that city that he was later involved with the Daimler Motor Company, who had been granted a licence by his company in Germany. In 1867 he was working at Bruderhaus Engineering Works at Reutlingen and in 1869 went to Maschinenbau Gesellschaft Karlsruhe where he became Manager and later a director. Early in the 1870s, N.A. Otto had reorganized his company into Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz and he appointed Gottlieb Daimler as Factory Manager and Wilhelm Maybach as Chief Designer. Together they developed the Otto engine to its limit, with Otto's co-operation. Daimler and Maybach had met previously when both were working at Bruderhaus. In 1875 Daimler left Deutz, taking Maybach with him to set up a factory in Stuttgart to manufacture light, high-speed internal-combustion engines. Their first patent was granted in 1883. This was for an engine fuelled by petrol and with hot tube ignition which continued to be used until Robert Bosch's low-voltage ignition became available in 1897. Two years later he produced his first vehicle, a motor cycle with outriggers. They showed a motor car at the Paris exhibition in 1889, but French manufacturers were slow to come forward and no French company could be found to undertake manufacture. Eventually Panhard and Levassor established the Daimler engine in France. Daimler Motoren GmbH was started in 1895, but soon after Daimler and Maybach parted, having provided an engine for a boat on the River Neckar in 1887 and that for the Wolfert airship in 1888. Daimler was in sole charge of the company from 1895, but his health began to decline in 1899 and he died in 1900.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Horology

[br]

[br]

[br]

After serving an apprenticeship with a clock-maker in Blaubeuren, Hipp worked for various clockmakers before setting up his own workshop in Reutlingen in 1840. In 1842 he made his first electric clock with an ingenious toggle mechanism for switching the current, although he claimed that the idea had occurred to him eight years earlier. The switching mechanism was the Achilles' heel of early electric clocks. It was usually operated by the pendulum and it presented the designer with a dilemma: if the switch made a firm contact it adversely affected the timekeeping, but if the contact was lightened it sometimes failed to operate due to dirt or corrosion on the contacts. The Hipp toggle switch overcame this problem by operating only when the amplitude of the pendulum dropped below a certain value. As this occurred infrequently, the contact pressure could be increased to provide reliable switching without adversely affecting the timekeeping. It is an indication of the effectiveness of the Hipp toggle that it was used in clocks for over one hundred years and was adopted by many other makers in addition to Hipp and his successor Favag. It was generally preferred for its reliability rather than its precision, although a regulator made in 1881 for the observatory at Neuchâtel performed creditably. This regulator was enclosed in an airtight case at low pressure, eliminating errors due to changes in barometric pressure. This practice later became standard for observatory regulators such as those of Riefler and Shortt. The ability of the Hipp toggle to provide more power when the clock was subjected to an increased load made it particularly suitable for use in turret clocks, whose hands were exposed to the vagaries of the weather. Hipp also improved the operation of slave dials, which were advanced periodically by an electrical impulse from a master clock. If the electrical contacts "chattered" and produced several impulses instead of a single sharp impulse, the slave dials would not indicate the correct time. Hipp solved this problem by producing master clocks which delivered impulses that alternated in polarity, and slave dials which only advanced when the polarity was changed in this way. Polarized impulses delivered every minute became the standard practice for slave dials used on the European continent. Hipp also improved Wheatstone's chronoscope, an instrument that was used for measuring very short intervals of time (such as those involved in ballistics).

[br]