August Wilhelm Maybach
Karl Maybach was born on July 6, 1879, in Cologne-Deutz.
The son of the engineer Wilhelm Maybach and his wife Bertha Wilhelmine, daughter of the postmaster and innkeeper Karl Gottfried Habermass.
The Maybach family had been based in Löwenstein near Heilbronn since the 16th century. The death of a Michael Maybach was documented as early as 1628. Christian Karl Maybach, Wilhelm Maybach's father and Karl Maybach's grandfather, was born in Löwenstein near Heilbronn in 1813. However, the trained carpenter died in an accident in 1856. This left his five sons, including Wilhelm, born in Heilbronn on February 9, 1846, orphans, as their mother, Luise Barbara, had died three years earlier, in 1853.
Friends of the family sought help for the children through an appeal to "noble philanthropists" in the "Stuttgarter Anzeiger." On March 20, 1856, the newspaper published an appeal with a "heartfelt request to charitable people to take care of five poor, fatherless and motherless boys between the ages of twelve and four through donations of love." The children were soon placed; Wilhelm was taken in at the Reutlingen Brotherhood House – by Gustav Albert Werner, who had founded this company and three factories in 1840. As "Father Werner," he became one of the founders of the Inner Mission in Württemberg. His factories were intended to become "temples of God," employ the disabled, and provide the material basis for the "Brotherhood Houses," of which there were already 33 and 1,000 people in care at the time of his death in 1887. Gustav Werner would have a lasting influence on Wilhelm Maybach's later life. In a letter from 1921, Wilhelm Maybach recalled
"At home, as well as in the Bruderhaus, I was encouraged to work early on, in addition to lessons and play, as well as to go to bed early and get up early again. At the age of 15, I began an apprenticeship and—because I was good at drawing—worked in the technical office of the machine factory belonging to the Bruderhaus. During my five-year apprenticeship, I attended the municipal advanced training school in physics and freehand drawing in the evenings, in which, with the help of my technical drawing skills, I was able to create perspective-designed systems. At the end of my apprenticeship, I was allowed to take the mathematical subjects of the Oberrealschule (high school), which then enabled me to study technical works privately. A commercial employee at our factory gave me and my friends language lessons. In my final year of apprenticeship, I was already busy with inventions. Among other things, I installed a bookbinder's gilding press with a petroleum heater in the shop. During my apprenticeship, I was able to observe the implementation of all my designs in the workshop and also do practical work for six months. In 1865, Mr. Daimler joined the Bruderhaus machine factory as a board member. In 1869, after 13 years of residence, I left the Bruderhaus and went to Karlsruhe . . . "