2500 patents stemmed from his career, these same patents have contributed to an indefinite number of lives saved.
Behind the colorful character of this exceptional inventor was an equally colorful life history. Béla was born on the 1st of March 1907 in Hirtenberg near Vienna. Béla was born into an era prior to the popularization of the automobile. As a result of affordability & availability horse-drawn carriages still dominated the streets as opposed to automobiles. Béla however, was born into one of the wealthiest families in Austria-Hungary- and so he was able to enjoy riding in a car from even an early age. One of the first family cars that he grew up loving was none other than the Austro-Daimler. When the First World War broke out, little Béla's fortunes changed. When he was only ten years old, his father was killed in action. Little by little, the war and the ensuing Great Depression swallowed up all the family's wealth. The financial disaster was so great that he even had to stop attending school for a time, because his widowed mother could no longer afford to pay his school fees.
However, Béla found ways and means to enroll as an engineering student at the Viennese Technical College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 1924. The young student's feel for future trends was astonishing: one of his first design projects was the front end of an automobile whereby the end piece of the body was a horizontal piece, bordered by two horizontal body ends. The horizontal piece as a predominant stylistic element was to be called the "New Look" a few years later – and to be integrated into many automobiles.
Béla graduated in 1926 but even for such a gifted Designer consistent work proved hard to find. Up until the mid-1930s he had to survive on temporary posts as a draughtsman and from freelance work as the author of technical treatises. The fact that his ideas were often ahead of their time did not save him from being the victim of redundancy himself. It was not until almost a decade after graduating that he was offered his first steady job at the Gesellschaft für technischen Fortschritt (GETEFO, Society for Technical Progress) in Berlin and later for its French partner company, SOPROTEC, in Paris.
In the time when he worked for GETEFO/SOPROTEC alone, he registered over 150 patents. But his days at GETEFO were numbered: at the beginning of 1939 he was once more out of a job. Desolated, he searched for a new position. That was when he recalled his childhood dream: the Austro-Daimler. He applied to Mercedes-Benz. And was turned down. Feeling he had nothing to lose, he tried his luck again. This time he was given the opportunity to prove his abilities to chairman Wilhelm Haspel in a one-to-one interview. Béla Barényi presented himself as the passionate perfectionist he was. He did not mince words, telling Haspel directly everything that was being done wrong in the design department. Haspel recognized the young man's enormous potential: "Mr Barényi, you are fifteen to twenty years ahead of your time.
You will be put under a glass cover in Sindelfingen. Everything you discover will go straight to the patent department." Béla never had to write a job application again. The thing that Mercedes-Benz and the designer had in common was their passion for safety. That was back in the days when car manufacturers carefully avoided using the term: particularly in the post-war period, nobody wanted to be reminded about the dangers of driving.
His biggest breakthrough came in 1951 when he registered patent DBP 854.157 – commonly known as the "crumple zone". Béla was the first to recognize – years before, in fact – that kinetic energy should be dispersed by deformation so as not to harm the occupants of the vehicle. The first Mercedes-Benz vehicle with bodywork developed according to this patent was the 1959 W111 series.
All in all, this discovery was to revolutionize the entire automotive industry. Béla Barényi was an inventor through and through. The expression "time to go home" only meant one thing for him: that he had to change locations to carry on experimenting. Numerous patents and designs, from the Ponton body to the Pagoda roof, from the "disappearing windscreen wiper" to the deformable steering column, can all be attributed to him.
In having a designer of this caliber, Mercedes-Benz was able to achieve a leading position in the field of vehicle safety to such an extent that in 1968 even the Vice President of the Ford Motor Company was forced to acknowledge:
"Quite honestly, I must admit that today we are still not in a position to fix the actual safety level of occupants when we change our models. We won't be able to compete with Daimler-Benz until after 1970."
In the 1990s, when the subject of safety became a central theme in advertising, there could be only one possible protagonist for Mercedes-Benz commercials: Béla Barényi.
And during his lifetime, in 1994, he was received into the "Automotive Hall of Fame" in Detroit and welcomed Into the circle of outstanding inventors and innovators. He died in Böblingen near Stuttgart in 1997. Today people are honored in his name for outstanding achievements in the field of traffic and automotive transport: the Béla Barényi Prize has been awarded in Vienna since 2005.
For more info about the history of the Mercedes-Benz Brand click here.
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