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« na: Siječanj 01, 2006, 02:35:04 » |
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Like many early car makers, Skoda's beginnings were in bicycle manufacturing. The story goes that a 26-year-old bookseller in the small provincial Bohemian town of Mlada Boleslav, Vaclav Klement, sent his bicycle back to its German manufacturer, along with a letter - in Czech - requesting repairs. He received a letter back - in German - which said that if he wanted an answer, he should write in a more understandable language. Klement was so disgusted, he decided that he would start his own bicycle company, despite having no previous technical experience. An already-established bicycle producer Vaclac Laurin, from nearby Turnov, was about to break from his existing business partner, and in 1895, he set up a workshop with Klement in Mlada Boleslav, 50km from Prague, to repair bicycles. They began manufacturing their own bikes under the brand name Slavia, and built their own factory in 1898, the year Klement bought a new innovation, a French-built Werner "motocyclette."
Klement's motocyclette, with an engine mounted onto the handlebars with a belt to drive the front wheels, was dangerous and unreliable - Laurin lost a front tooth in an early incident on it. The pair wrote to ignition specialist Robert Bosch for advice on a different electromagnetic ignition system, and started to design a safer machine, with its structure around the engine. The Slavia motorcycle, the first motorbike which wasn't simply a pushbike with a motor strapped on, made its debut in 1899, and exports started in 1900, including 150 shipped to London. The L&K Slavia bikes won a number of important road races over the next five years, including the 1901 Paris-Berlin, the 1902 Paris-Vienna and the 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup; licences for their manufacture were sold to the French company Alcyon and German firm Seidel and Naumann - the former bicycle firm which had been so rude to Klement a few years before.
Laurin and Klement had begun experimenting with four-wheeled motor-propelled machines as early as 1900, however, and by 1905, the Type A was in production. This was a light-weight, relatively affordable two-seater, with a 1005cc two-cylinder 7hp engine, capable of 40kph. It was launched at the Prague Motor Show in April 1906, and was promptly followed by the four-seater Type B and further variants, including the four-cylinder, 21hp Type F and eight-cylinder, 5.0-litre Type FF, which made a successful promotional journey to the 1907 Paris Motor Show. Laurin and Klement continued to make motorbikes and sidecars, which they supplied to Post Offices all over the world, including England, as well as diversifying into making buses, and 1907 they floated their company on the stock market to raise capital to expand their factory. In the run-up to the First World War, their vehicles won competitions including the 1908 St Petersburg-Moscow and various hillclimbs, as well as setting speed records at Brooklands. Former Benz engineer Otto Hieronimus became chief designer, and oversaw the production of complex Knight sliding-tract valveless engines - at the former RAF (Reichenberger Automobil-Fabrik) factory in Liberec, taken over in 1912 - as well as commercial vehicles, buses, motor ploughs and stationary Brons engines, all exported worldwide, even as far as Japan. The simple Type S (1911-1916) was particularly popular.
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