1918 Tatra engineer dies
Hans Ledwinka, the engineer who created the Tatra marquee, died in Munich, Germany, at the age of 89. Early in his career, Ledwinka took over engineering for Nesseldorf Wagenbau of Austria-Hungary when the founder of the company, Hugo von Roslerstamm, decided the company should enter racing. Under Ledwinka's leadership, the Rennzweier and the Type A racers were produced. The cars demonstrated modest racing success, and wide-scale production of the Type S began in 1909. Nesseldorf Wagenbau continued to grow until 1914, when, coinciding with the outbreak of WWI, it shifted to railroad production. On October 28, 1918, two weeks before the end of the war on the Western Front, the Moravian town of Nesseldorf of Austria-Hungary became the city of Koprivnicka in the newly created country of Czechoslovakia. Just after the war, Hans Ledwinka began construction of a new automobile to be marketed under the marquee Tatra, a division of the newly named Koprivnicka Wagenbau. The Tatra High Mountains are among the highest mountains in the Carpathian Mountain Range, the legendary home of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Ledwinka settled on the name Tatra in 1919 when an experimental model of his car with four-wheel brakes passed a sleigh on an icy mountain road, prompting the sleigh riders to exclaim, "This is a car for the Tatras." In 1923, the first official Tatra automobile, the Tatra T11, was completed, and Ledwinka's hope for an affordable "people's car" was realized. The reliable, rugged T11, like Ford's Model T, gave many Czechoslovakians their first opportunity to own an automobile. In 1934, Tatra achieved automotive notoriety with the introduction of the Tatra 77, the world's first aerodynamically styled automobile powered by a rear-mounted air-cooled engine