page_title: Max Wenkel
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Max Wenkel / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Water velociped built by Max Wenkel 1895
context_page_description: Max Wenkel was a German automobile pioneer and inventor.
context_section_description: Like other automobile pioneers Max Wenkel began his career as an engineer and inventor with the construction of bicycles. He built his first pennyfarthing bicycle while still an apprentice engineer, and was soon taking part in races with well-known cyclists such as Willy Tischbein, who later became Director General of the Continental-Caoutchouc and Guttapercha Company. He accompanied the future founder of the Adler Bicycle and Automobile Company, Dr. Heinrich Kleyer, on a trip to study the manufacture of bicycles in England at the beginning of the 1880s. Later he was employed at the Duplex bicycle factory in Berlin.
  In 1895 he successfully experimented with a water velocipede on the rivers Leine and Ihme near Hanover. As early as 1899 he exhibited a small car at the First International Exhibition in Berlin. Between 1901 and 1903 Wenkel travelled through East India, Java, Sumatra and Borneo, where he built the first Wenkelmobils in rather primitive conditions. When back in Germany, the Berlin factory of Schneider & Co started the production of his Wenkelmobil. Wenkel won numerous prizes with it in races in its small-car class. In 1906 and 1907 he travelled the length of South America down to Patagonia in a Wenkelmobil. He was officially commissioned to open up the Cordillera region for motor traffic, and also built flat-bottomed speed boats suitable for Argentine rivers. Wenkel acquired several patents, e.g. for the Wenkelmobil’s friction drive and a high-speed compression and vacuum pump. The Berlin Directory lists him as engineer and owner of a technical bureau and export firm during World War I. When well over sixty he won the prestigious Garbaty Trophy with his speedboat "Java II", in 1929. Three years later he was still making his mark with the invention of a "motor in a trunk car", a newfangled though unsuccessful miniature automobile. An article in a boys’ yearbook in 1943 suggests that Wenkel died in that year, but his precise date of death has yet to be confirmed.
caption: Wenkel's water tricycle 1895
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