František Janeček

František Janeček (23 January 1878 – 4 June 1941) was a Czech engineer and entrepreneur. He was the founder of Jawa motorcycles and an important figure in the development of the Czechoslovak motorcycle industry. He went to Prague to study mechanics at the Prague Technical School and then moved to Germany to the Berlin College of Engineering.

Upon graduation he returned to Prague and began working for the Jewish industrialist Emil Kolben at the Kolben company. He did well and when he was only 23 he was appointed manager of the new factory opened by Kolben in the Netherlands, where he met his future wife. He was hit by a car when riding his bicycle to work. The daughter of the driver gave him first aid, and they became friends and later married. It consisted in a pneumatic system with a series of air tubes which activated a mesh of tiles, that each one had a black face and a white face. When air flowed through an individual tube, the tile attached to it would flip, revealing its white face and allowing to show an image on the background of black tiles. This way, the pneumograph could display several advertisements and daily reports. A prototype was presented on the top of a building in the Národní avenue in Prague, located at the Jungmannovo náměstí 761/1 address, drawing the public's attention.

Janeček's plans included the installation of other pneumographs in Berlin, Warsaw and St. Petersburg. However, the arrival of World War I put negotiations to a halt, and his project was never developed. The grenade, named Model 21, became the standard hand grenade of the Czechoslovak army, and was nicknamed the "Janeček".

Motorcycle development Janeček saw an opportunity in 1927 to turn a former armament factory into a motorcycle manufacturing company. He drew on his knowledge of engineering and his experience with factory mass production techniques and based his new motorcycle designs around an existing 498cc engine made by a German company called Wanderer. The new company was named JAWA in 1929, a compound of the first two letters of Janeček and Wanderer. In the 1930s Janeček expanded the range to include lightweight economy models based around British Villiers two-stroke engines, as well as middleweight 350cc side valve and overhead valve motorcycles under the Jawa brand (e.g. Jawa 350).