Ettore Bugatti  Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti (15 September 1881 – 21 August 1947) was an Italian-born French automobile designer and manufacturer. He is remembered as the founder and proprietor of the automobile manufacturing company Automobiles E. Bugatti, which he founded in 1909 in the then German town of Molsheim in the Alsace region of what is now France. Bugatti died in Paris, and is buried in Dorlisheim in the Bas-Rhin (Lower Rhine) department of today's France. Bugatti was born into an artistic family with its origin in Milan, Italy. He was the elder son of Carlo Bugatti (1856–1940), an important Italian Art Nouveau furniture and jewelry designer, and his wife Teresa Lorioli. His younger brother, Rembrandt (1884–1916), was a renowned animal sculptor. His aunt, Luigia Bugatti, was the wife of the painter Giovanni Segantini. His paternal grandfather, Giovanni Luigi Bugatti, was an architect and sculptor. Bugatti's father intended that he follow a conventional technical apprenticeship with one of the Milanese tri-/quadricycle manufacturers, but the boy quickly demonstrated a deep instinctive understanding of wide range of aspects of motor-vehicle construction, and with Prinetti & Stucchi constructed his "Bugatti Type 1" in 1898. With financial support from a Count Gulinelli, Bugatti developed a second prototype, the Type 2, which was a prize-winning exhibit at the in the Spring of 1901. His design also caught the eye of Baron Adrien de Turckheim, who offered Bugatti the opportunity to come and design automobiles at his Lorraine-Dietrich car factory in Niederbronn. Frontier changes following the Franco-Prussian War had left De Dietrich with two car factories in two different countries: the Niederbronn plant, to which Bugatti now relocated was in Alsace, which had been part of Germany since 1871, reverting to French control only in 1919. From 1902 through 1904, De Dietrich built his Type 3/4 and Type 5/6/7, identified at the time with the name "De Dietrich, Licence Bugatti". While working for De Dietrich Bugatti met Émile Mathis. The two became first friends and then business partners, leaving De Dietrich in 1904 in order to produce automobiles of their own, which were identified with the name "Mathis-Hermes (Licence Bugatti)".