One balmy summer night in 1919, when he was just a seventeen-year-old school boy in post-World War I Germany, Felix Heinrich Wankel had an improbable dream. He awoke the next morning to recall a vision in which he drove to a concert in a car that he had built by hand. In the dream he had boasted to his friend, "My car has a new type of engine: a half-turbine, half-recriprocated [sic] engine. I invented it!