Hans Hautsch was a toolmaker, like his father, Antoni, and his grandfather, Kilian. He married Magdalena on June 25, 1621, the daughter of the carpenter Jacob Flexlein. They had a daughter and five sons: Georg, Gottfried, and Johann Andreas. Gottfried invented the conical ignition for pistols in 1702, making them three times as fast. In 1649, Hans Hautsch built a wheelchair lift for hospital patients. Shortly thereafter, he built a four-wheeled clockwork-driven mechanical car, which allegedly drove 1.6 km/h by itself. He delivered another triumphal car, which was specified to be driven by clockwork. But in 1651 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer contradicted this in his Journal des Voyages, where he explained that a boy operated a crank inside.
Fire-engine
In 1650, Hans Hautsch built a fire-engine pump with compressed air to deliver a continuous jet of water up to heights of 20 metres. On each side, 14 men worked a piston rod back and forth in a horizontal direction. In 1655, Caspar Schott inspected the fire engine and reported on it in his Magia universalis. Rumours of a flying machine are probably based on a misunderstanding: Hautsch built a moving-wing eagle on the occasion of an imperial visit to the Free Imperial City. In 1664 he delivered the King of Denmark a mechanised dollhouse with over 100 individual movements of the figures. The following year, he built a battle set for King Louis XIV of France and his son, with about 462 moving silver soldiers complete with battle noise. He also built a three-story automaton, in which the creation of the world and biblical scenes are portrayed below, including 72 craftsmen at work above a large bath. Hautsch also invented the "scattered lustre". "The preparation consists of sieving or dusting fine filings of various metals, washing them in strong liquid, and then tempering them on a sheet of copper or iron laid over red-hot coals, with constant stirring. The shavings of brass then take all kinds of shades of gold, those of copper the shades of red, those of iron and steel those of blue and violet, and of tin and bismuth of white and bluish-white colour with metallic brilliance. These coloured shavings are run through a flat mill, which consists of two well-polished rolls of the hardest steel, and resembles those which the gold and silver-wire-pullers have, except that here for convenience a funnel is placed above." His descendants have made this scattered luster until the end of the 18th century.
