7 Felix Wankel 7Lake Constance near the border with Switzerland, where
he worked on designs for seals, unconventional rotary
valves, and rotary engines for automobile and airplane
engines. At various times he worked for the Daimler-Benz
and BMW automobile companies as well as the German air
force. At the end of the war his workshop was dismantled
by the Allied authorities, and in 1951 he began working in
Lindau with the research department of an engine manu-
facturer, NSU Motorenwerk AG. He completed his first
design of a rotary engine for NSU in 1954, and prototype
units were tested in 1957 and 1958. In 1961 Mazda, a
Japanese automobile company, contracted with NSU to
produce and develop the Wankel engine in Japan. Rotary-
engined Mazda cars were introduced to the Japanese
market in the 1960s and to the American market in 1971.
Wankel established a series of his own research establish-
ments at Lindau, where he continued to work under contract
for various companies on the fundamental problems and
future applications of the rotary engine. He received a
number of honours from engineering societies in Germany
and abroad, and in 1969 he was awarded an honorary
doctorate from the Technical University of Munich.
Committed all his life to antivivisectionism, Wankel in
1972 founded the annual or semiannual Felix Wankel
Animal Welfare Research Award for papers and projects
related to animal welfare and the cessation of experimen-
tation on live animals.
John von Neumann
(b. Dec. 28, 1903, Budapest, Hung.—d. Feb. 8, 1957, Washington,
D.C., U.S.)
J
ohn von Neumann (originally named János Neumann)
was a Hungarian-born American mathematician. As an
adult, he appended von to his surname; the hereditary title