From the copper mould to the car

The book will introduce you to the history of the Liberec engineering factory Ch. Linser, which was the first to produce an automobile in Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century – a voiturette with a four-cylinder engine. The company' s production of motorcycles and cars lasted only a short time, but it continued to cooperate with a number of automotive companies and after the war became a foundry. p. LIAZ.

During the 19th century, North Bohemia developed into a rich industrial region with its center in Liberec. In addition to the key textile industry, the field of mechanical engineering also soon began to develop. The company Christian Linser has also developed into an important company in this sector. Its founder came to Bohemia from Tyrol as a journeyman coppersmith and settled in Liberec in 1858, where he built a significant factory from a small workshop that produced various boilers and distribution equipment for the textile and food industries. In addition to this production, it also dealt with firefighting equipment.
In 1896, Christian' s son Rudolf Linser, a technically educated young man who had already been involved in motoring issues in the 1890s, joined the company' s management. Under his leadership, at the beginning of the 20th century, the company began developing and producing motorcycles, and at the turn of 1905 and 1906, the first automobile came out of the company' s design workshop - voituretta, the first car with a four-cylinder engine in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. Even though the production of motor vehicles at Linser ended in 1907, the foundry branch of the plant developed into an important foundry for the motor industry not only in Bohemia, but also in Austria and Germany.
The economic crisis of the 1930s ended the Linser business in Liberec, and after the end of World War II, the family was first relocated to Germany and then returned to Tyrol, where Rudolf Linser, now eighty years old, was still involved in motor racing. However, the focus of this book is on the share of the company Ch. Linser at the beginnings of motoring in Bohemia in the first years of the twentieth century.