Ferdinand Porsche

<p>Across six turbulent decades Ferdinand Porsche sketched soldered and strategised his way from a Bohemian tinsmith's shop to the boardrooms that powered monarchies dictatorships and global brands. His wheel-hub motors dazzled the Paris Expo of 1900; his super-charged Kompressor cars ruled inter-war racing; his design for the KdF-Wagen became the Volkswagen Beetle; and his forced-labor tank projects darkened the Eastern Front. After 1945 the sawmill workshops of Gmünd birthed the 356 coupé the 550 Spyder and ultimately the 911-machines that rewrote the grammar of speed while financing a consultancy whose fingerprints now span Formula One turbos and dual-clutch road cars.</p><p></p><p>Drawing on factory minutes dyno sheets interrogation transcripts and race reports Ferdinand Porsche: Engineering for Empires and Beyond tells a double-edged story of brilliance and complicity. It follows the man who could reduce friction to decimals yet left moral questions unanswered and it charts how an idea of lightweight rear-engine efficiency survived regime change imprisonment and the discipline of global markets. Fact-only narrative-rich this book threads mechanical ingenuity and industrial ethics into a single unflinching chronicle of the engineer whose echo still powers the roads-and debates-of the twenty-first century.</p>