The Bavarian Motor Works

In the early 1700s Munich was a relatively small city. Nearby, were the towns of Dachau, Schleissheim, and Nymphenburg. Nymphenburg was the summer palace of the Wittelsback dynasty which also owned the large tract of land that separated the towns. Sometime in the 1800s, part of this tract of land was acquired by the Imperial Bavarian War Ministry as a military exercise and training ground. Magazines were also built there for the garrison’s gunpowder stores. This green plot of land became known as Oberwiesenfeld.

In 1909 a Parseval airship landed there and ushered in the era of military aviation. Later that year the first airplanes arrived. The area’s young men of vision flocked to the field, and around the edge of the exercise ground, small workshops shot up like mushrooms after a rain. Among the new arrivals were Gustav Otto and Karl Rapp. The BMW story begins here, on the edge of the Oberwiesenfeld airstrip, now called Olympic Park, just across the road from the present BMW "Four Cylinder" headquarters building. 

Gustav Otto was the son of Nikolaus Otto, from Cologne, who invented the “Otto cycle” or four-stroke gasoline engine used in nearly every automobile made today. Young Gustav saw the future in aviation and immersed himself in it. He founded dozens of small companies to make airplanes and airplane parts; he started a flying school, and made aircraft engines. He founded the Gustav Otto Flugmotorenfabrik (Aircraft Engine Factory).

In August 1915 Gustav fell ill and checked himself into a mental hospital. By the next spring the company faced bankruptcy. On March 7, 1916, with the help of his bank, the various small companies Gustav Otto had founded were rolled into a single public limited company - Bayerische Flugzeug-Werk (Bavarian Aircraft Works). Otto left the company almost immediately thereafter, and ten years later, on February 26, 1926, he committed suicide. 

Karl Rapp was an engineer who independently set about to develop and build aircraft engines. His company was called Karl Rapp Motorenwerke Munchen and became moderately successful during the early part of The Great War. In 1916, Rapp's company merged with Gustav's Bayarische Flugzueg-Werk. Shortly after that, Rapp also became seriously ill and resigned. On July 20, 1917, after some additional consolidation and mergers, the new company was renamed Bayerische Moteren Werke, GmbH, or simply: BMW. Franz Josef Popp was running the show. Popp immediately registered the company roundel logo, surmounted by the letters “BMW”. The logo incorporated two blue and two white quadrants in homage to his Bavarian homeland. Contrary to popular belief, the logo did not depict a stylized propeller. A popular advertisement, some years later, showed a whirling propeller whose image resembled the company logo

After a trip to the United States, Popp began to look around for a way to get into the volume automobile business. These were times of rampant inflation in Germany. The effects of the 1914-18 Great War were still being felt, and any attempt to sell luxury cars was likely to be doomed to failure. Popp began by considering a revolutionary economy-car prototype designed by Professor Wunibald Kamm. This car was astonishingly advanced for its time, with unibody aluminum alloy construction, front-wheel drive, all-around independent suspension, and a flat-twin engine. It was, however, too complicated to be built cheaply. Popp therefore continued to look elsewhere. 

Not long afterwards, in 1927, a new economy car appeared on the German market. Known as the Dixi 3/15, it was actually the British Austin Seven, built under license by the Eisenach Vehicle Factory. As it happened, Popp knew the owner of the industrial group who owned the company and he lost no time in proposing a deal under which the company and its manufacturing licenses would pass to BMW. In November 1928, BMW bought the company and in January, 1929, the famous blue and white roundel, of aero engine and motorcycle fame, began to appear on automobiles trundling along the back roads of Germany.

Let us not forget that in the shadows of this success story are BMW's illegitimate 1890s "ultimate driving machine" ancestors: the forgotten little race cars of Eisenach.