For more than 100 years, the automotive world has been blessed with ground-breaking designers and engineers who earned their place in history for their respective innovations. Béla Barényi, who is credited with designing crumple zones, frontal pedestrian protection, multi-piece steering columns, protection against side impacts and many other advances, is in a class by himself. Certainly, untold thousands owe their lives to this man who believed in safety as far back as the 1930s.
Béla Viktor Barényi worked for Mercedes-Benz from 1939 to 1972, and headed up the German company's pre-development department. Throughout his career, he earned more than 2,500 patents, showing ready proof of his visionary genius. Early on, he recognized the need for automotive safety. For example, in 1904, a London police report showed that there were 24,375 accidents in England alone! In those crashes, there were 8,561 injuries, 982 of them serious ones, and 215 people were killed.
Barényi was born in Hirtenberg near Vienna in 1907. His father was a secondary school teacher at a military academy, where he taught mathematics and was a talented draftsman, an ability he passed on to his son. Being a member of the upper class meant that young Barényi came in contact with a luxury Austro-Daimler, also known as a "Kaiserwagen." At the age of seven, he was stricken with a hip inflammation, which stiffened his hip for life. That was a portent of tragedy that would continue throughout his young life; his father died, then his wealthy grandparents, and a depression ruined the Austrian industrial empire. Because of her life-long position in society, Barényi's mother had relinquished legal rights to a widow's pension. Suddenly, she found herself destitute, and her son had to quit school.
Thinking back to that Kaiserwagen, young Barényi became fascinated with technical car developments of the time. One day, he noticed that the steering wheel hub on a Ford Model T came to a point, leading to what he believed was a threat to the driver's safety in a crash. He designed his own wheel, in which the hub was set low and wide. He put the wheel on a bobsled he had made during his training with the car and machine tool company. He received formal training at Wiener Technikum, and graduated in 1926, following his thesis on a 50-horsepower six-cylinder engine. In 1925, he developed the basic concept for what would become the Volkswagen Beetle, with a tubular backbone chassis that could hold a four-cylinder engine, either out front or in the back. He also foresaw a horizontally opposed engine, mounted behind the rear axle in the rear-engined version.
Times turned tough for the young engineer in 1934, when he found himself out of a job. He went through several positions and landed at Gesellschaft für Technischen Fortschritt (GETEFO), where one of his first projects was a car with an elastically mounted middle section that would protect passengers from any disturbing vibrations and harmonics created by the car. The first patent for the cell car was registered in 1935. During his short time at GETEFO, Barényi registered more than 150 patents, mostly dealing with the automotive and aircraft industries. One of those patents, in 1935, was a bearing element (Silentblock) that enabled an engine block to be hung in such a way as to ward off vibration. Despite his success there, he found himself out of work in 1939--again. At his wits' end, Barényi called Karl Wilfert at Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart, looking for work, where he was hired.
Other innovations of Barényi's were safety features included in the Terracruiser project, which are still models for excellence when designing vehicles like this today. The most noticeable feature is the position of the six seats, with the adjustable driver's seat in the middle. This was so that in the event of side impact, the seat position offers a solo driver the best possible protection.
In 1959, the Mercedes-Benz 220 SE had a rigid passenger cell, for the first time surrounded by impact-absorbing zones. This Barényi innovation would lay the groundwork for similar engineering in other models all the way up to the 300 SE. Other technical innovations included a compressed air suspension and brake pressure reducing valve, which prevented the front end of the car from dipping upon hard braking by the four-wheel disc brakes.
Some may think Barényi had it easy because he was such an innovator; quite the contrary. In his book, Béla Barényi, The Father of Passive Safety
, Dr. Harry Niemann writes that because Daimler-Benz AG was primarily concerned with proving itself with sports car success, passive safety was secondary. Niemann writes, "Most other people would have perhaps become discouraged, but Barényi followed up his ideas with incredible determination."
That determination paid off. After 17 years, passive safety was of the utmost importance at Daimler-Benz. The international press praised the German company for its commitment to safety--thanks, primarily, to Barényi. Another one of his patents, from 1963, was the "safe steering column," which would give during a crash due to its deformable design.
One of the first tasks that Barényi completed for Daimler-Benz was an invention that would not be put into production for 37 years. This was the Hidden Windscreen Wiper, a design in which the windscreen wiper is concealed in the car's bodywork, an important feature if a pedestrian were hit by a car. This invention first appeared in the Type 126 S-Class, produced from 1985.
Barényi was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1994, and was one of 26 legendary automotive designers to be nominated for "Car Engineer of the Century" in 1999. The winner was Dr. Ferdinand Porsche. Barényi died at age 90 in 1997.
This article originally appeared in the October, 2007 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.
Order Backissues of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car
Subscribe to Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car