7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Inc., Wichita, Kan., which produced its first compact jet

in 1963. The new company’s jets became among the

world’s most popular private jet aircraft. Lear sold his

interest in the corporation in 1967 and formed Lear

Motors Corporation (1967– 69) to produce a steam car.

Felix Wankel

(b. Aug. 13, 1902, Lahr, Ger.—d. Oct. 9, 1988, Lindau, W.Ger.)

G

erman engineer Felix Wankel was the inventor of

the Wankel rotary engine. The Wankel engine is

radically different in structure from conventional recipro-

cating piston engines. Instead of pistons that move up and

down in cylinders, the Wankel engine has a triangular

orbiting rotor that turns in a closed chamber. Each quarter

turn of the rotor completes an expansion or a compres-

sion of the gases inside the chamber, permitting the four

functions characteristic of all internal-combustion

engines—intake, compression, expansion, and exhaust—to

be accomplished during one turn of the rotor. The only

moving parts are the rotor and the output shaft. In theory,

the advantages of this design include light weight, few

moving parts, compactness, low initial cost, fewer repairs,

and relatively smooth performance.

Wankel never earned an engineering degree and in

fact never acquired a driver’s license. The son of a forestry

official in the Black Forest region of southern Germany,

he grew up in straitened circumstances after his father was

killed in World War I. As a young man, convinced that he

could design a practical rotary engine (the concept was

well known but usually dismissed as unworkable), he set up

a small engineering business in Heidelberg while financing

himself with other jobs such as bookselling. He was briefly

a member of the Nazi Party before it rose to power. During

the Nazi and World War II period he settled in Lindau, on