paul jaray

Paul Jaray (March 1889 – 22 September 1974) was a Vienna-born engineer, designer, and a pioneer of automotive streamlining.

Paul Jaray came from one of the oldest Prague-born Jewish families of scholars and artists called the Jeitteles, later his family moving to the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jaray, of Hungarian-Jewish descent, was born in Vienna. Jaray studied at Maschinenbauschule in Vienna and worked at the Prague Technical University as an assistant to Professor Rudolf Dörfl.

Later he became the chief design engineer for the aircraft building firm Flugzeugbau Friedrichshafen, designing seaplanes. From 1914 Jaray worked at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, located in the same town, concentrating on streamlining airships. Jaray designed the airship LZ 120 Bodensee on which airships such as the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, the LZ 129 Hindenburg and the LZ-130 were later based. Further experiments in LZ's wind tunnel led to his establishment of streamlining principles for car designs. In 1923 he moved permanently to Switzerland, opening an office in Brunnen.

In 1923 Jaray founded the Stromlinien Karosserie Gesellschaft, which presented numerous designs for streamlined car body work. It issued licences to major vehicle manufacturers including Tatra Works in Kopřivnice, Czechoslovakia. Tatra was the only manufacturer that used Jaray's streamlining principles purchasing his licences for their car production. Jaray designed car bodies for other manufacturers starting with the 1922 Ley and followed on with designs for Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Maybach, Apollo, Dixi, Audi, Adler, Jawa, Ford, Steyr and others.

His own 1934 car was built on an Audi 2-litre Front chassis with a body by Huber and Brühwiler of Lucerne. Jaray also designed the body for the streamlined Auto Union Typ B Lucca Rennlimousine in 1934. Jaray was also interested in radio and television technology. In 1941 he worked for Farner AG in Grenchen on nosewheel undercarriage design. In 1944 he set up as an independent engineer working on wind-driven power station. He was the author of a large number of technical patents relating to streamlining, air compressors for railway, and devices for handling gases in silencers. Later he lectured at the Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zürich, which now holds Paul Jaray's archive.

Jaray died in 1974 in St. Gallen impoverished and forgotten by the automobile industry.

The exhibition focuses on the biography of the Vienna-born inventor Paul Jaray (1889-1974), who came from one of Prague's oldest Jewish families of scholars: his role in the development of the Silver Arrows (Silberpfeile) and the Volkswagen was largely purged from engineering/design history and public consciousness through the propaganda policies of the Nazi regime. For the first time, the research for this exhibition provides documentary evidence of the connections between economic interests, competition in early modernist automobile design, and systemic racism under German fascism. Another focal point is the previously unexplored influence that Jaray's rigorous designs had on avant-garde art.

Yet in 1974 he died anonymously and in poverty in Switzerland, while the town where he lived, St. Gallen on Lake Constance, did not even publish an obituary. None of his neighbors knew who he was, nor that his scientific breakthroughs would spawn an artificial mode of product design around the world, counter to his intentions and without his consent. The circumstances behind his eventual anonymity require explanation. This is of particular importance, since he was an extremely productive inventor who developed fundamental innovations that are still omnipresent in common technical products today––without his authorship having ever been recognized or respected.

His scientific research on fluid mechanics for landbased vehicles was exploited by the fascist Nazi regime in Germany, primarily for the massive propaganda exercises of the grand automobile spectacles. The most important components of this were the record-breaking racing cars, the so-called Silver Arrows (Silberpfeile), especially those of the Auto-Union, and the concept of the “Kraft-durch-Freude” Volkswagen, later called the Beetle. For all of these vehicles, the body designs optimized to reduce drag can be traced back to Jaray’s discoveries and patents.

Since the Nazi political regime in Germany could not bear to credit a Jew for developing these futuristic car bodies associated with nationalistic mythologizing, Jaray’s name was purged from public consciousness, and largely from the history of engineering as well. At the same time, many automobile manufacturers took advantage of the political implementation of systemic, institutionalized racism, by ignoring his patent rights and assuming control of his inventions without acknowledging him. Jaray’s rationally and mathematically derived forms were on the one hand rejected by popular taste, and on the other, ignored the automakers’ need for a recognizable brand identity. Despite this, due to the increasing focus on aerodynamics these proliferated, and took on a generic, commonplace character.

One of the most beautiful and logical body forms among these, which still seems like a utopian vision, is that of the fully-enclosed Auto-Union Type-B of 1935, the so-called “racing sedan” (Rennlimousine). It was only used once for a successful attempt at breaking the record, on the Firenze-Mare freeway near Lucca, on February 15th, 1935, which is why it is also called the “Lucca Car.” Driven by Hans Stuck, it was the first automobile to reach a speed of almost 300 km/h on a normal road, thus setting two world records.