August Horch

August Horch (1868 to 1951) was a German engineer and automobile pioneer who founded the companies that grew into Audi. Born in Winningen in the Rhenish Prussia of his day, he trained first as a blacksmith, then studied engineering at the technical college in Mittweida and worked in shipbuilding before joining Karl Benz in 1896. In November 1899 he set up A. Horch and Company in Cologne, built the first Horch automobile in 1901, and moved the firm to Reichenbach in 1902 and Zwickau in 1904. After a dispute he left in 1909 and started a rival firm in Zwickau; when a court ruled that he could no longer use his own surname as a trade name, he renamed it Audi, a Latin form of Horch, in 1910. He left Audi in 1920, published his autobiography I Built Cars in 1937, and later sat on the board of Auto Union, which succeeded the Audi company he had founded. He was honoured as an honorary citizen of Zwickau and an honorary professor at Braunschweig University of Technology.