Posts tagged heroes

nickdrake:

Laural And Hardy.

So much better than Chaplin.

definemotorsports:

Did you know?

Carlo Abarth (Or Karl Abarth) (Left) decided to choose a scorpion as the icon of his company because he was born under the sign of the “Scorpione” or “Scorpion” ?

Also, during the 60s Abarth cars were really popular, especially the Fiat Abarth 500 and 600, and there used to be a saying that was going like this:

Italian: Che cos’è? Una lepre? No, un coniglio Abarth!

English: What’s that? A hare? No, It’s an Abarth rabbit!

(If you didn’t catch the meaning, the hare is faster than the rabbit, but they’re both almost the same size and very similar each other.)

PS: The guy at Carlo Abarth’s right is Tazio Nuvolari

nickdrake:

nikola tesla

In 1909, Guglielmo Marconi was awarded a Nobel Prize for his development of radio. From this point on, the history books began to refer to him as “the father of radio.” In fact, radio had many inventors, not the least of which was Nikola Tesla. But Marconi was now a wealthy man and Tesla was penniless.

“My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary,” said Tesla, “that I must put out something commercial without delay.”

In 1912, Tesla tested a revolutionary new kind of turbine engine. Both Westinghouse Manufacturing and the General Electric Company had spent millions developing bladed turbine designs, which were essentially powerful windmills in a housing. Tesla’s design was something altogether different. In it, a series of closely spaced discs were keyed to a shaft. With only one moving part, Tesla’s design was of ideal simplicity, much like the AC motor he had invented years earlier. Fuels such as steam or vaporized gas were injected into the spaces between the discs, spinning the motor at a high rate of speed. In fact, the turbine operated at such high revolutions to the minute that the metal in the discs distorted from the heat. Eventually, Tesla abandoned the project.

With no great prospects to speak of, Tesla began visiting the local parks more often, rescuing injured pigeons, and often taking them back to his hotel room to nurse them. Years later, when he lived at the Hotel New Yorker, he had the hotel chef prepare a special mix of seed for his pigeons, which he hoped to sell commercially. Naturally, this prompted speculation about his mental well-being. His aversion to germs also heightened in this period, and he began to wash his hands compulsively and would eat only boiled foods.

In spite of his growing eccentricity, fruitful ideas continued to spring from his imagination. At the beginning of World War I, Tesla described a means for detecting ships at sea. His idea was to transmit high-frequency radio waves that would reflect off the hulls of vessels and appear on a fluorescent screen. The idea was too far ahead of its day, but it was one of the first descriptions of what we now call radar. Tesla was also the first to warn of an era when flying vehicles without wings could be remotely controlled to land with an explosive charge on an unsuspecting enemy.

In 1922, at sixty-five years of age, Tesla still dressed impeccably. Yet friends observed that his clothing, like his scientific theories, now appeared old-fashioned. He managed to make a living by working as a consulting engineer, but more often than not he delivered plans that his clients deemed impractical.

During this period, Tesla spoke out vehemently against the new theories of Albert Einstein, insisting that energy is not contained in matter, but in the space between the particles of an atom.

In the late 1920s, Tesla began to develop a friendship with George Sylvester Viereck, a well-known German poet and mystic. Though nearly a recluse, Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife. Competitive by nature, Tesla wrote a strange poem that he dedicated to his friend. It was called “Fragments of Olympian Gossip” and poked vitriolic fun at the scientific establishment of the day.

Tesla’s business with the U. S. Patent Office was still not finished. In 1928, at the age of seventy-two, he received his last patent, number 6,555,114, “Apparatus For Aerial Transportation.” This brilliantly designed flying machine resembled both a helicopter and an airplane. According to the inventor, the device would weigh eight-hundred pounds. It would rise from a garage, a roof, or a window as desired, and would sell at $1,000 for both military and consumer uses. This novel invention was the progenitor of today’s tiltrotor or VSTOL (vertical short takeoff and landing) plane. Unfortunately, Tesla never had the money to build a prototype.

rod42:

this ones for you ” rod42”

Thank you my friend, my, look at how young they are in this photo…

Elvis was brilliant before the films and the Army. Cash? Just all-round fantastic. Simple, gutsy songs and performances. Just brilliant.

hakkalocken:

 Hailwood 7r at Silverstone 1960

i12bent:

No big OF spotlight tonight, just a lone American hero…

Chuck Yeager (b. Feb. 13, 1923) was a test pilot in the early days of jet and rocket planes. He became the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947, flying a Bell X-1 plane - named Glamorous Glennis, after his wife, of course…

Yeager continued flying and setting records long after his formal retirement. His exploits were memorably described in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff…

“That’s all a man needs… To be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames: ‘My God!… you look awful.’” —Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Above - Chuck Yeager with the Douglas X-3. (U.S. Air Force photo)

ecurie:

Ago’s leap

Giacomo Agostini (born 16 June 1942 in Brescia, Lombardy) is an Italian multi-time world champion Grand Prixmotorcycle road racer. Nicknamed Ago, he is the all-time leader in victories in motorcycle Grand Prix history, with 122 Grand Prix wins and 15 World Championships titles. Of these, 68 wins and 8 titles came in the 500cc class, the rest in the 350cc class.

wheelike:

It’s Barry Sheene, champion GP & Formula 500 & 750 racer, and all-round hero.

desiestevez:

Brian Setzer on Flickr.

Setzer - one of my all-time guitar-heroes, and one of the best finger-pickers ever.

Eddie Cochran (October 3, 1938 – April 17, 1960), was an American rock and roll pioneer who in his brief career had a small but lasting influence on rock music through his guitar playing. Cochran’s rockabilly songs, such as “C’mon Everybody”, “Somethin’ Else”, and “Summertime Blues”, captured teenage frustration and desire in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the words of Lester Bangs, writing in Rolling Stone in 1972, “Eddie may have imitated Elvis vocally even more than a dozen or so other stalwarts of the day such as Conway Twitty, but his influence on pop consciousness of the magnitude of The Beatles and The Who was deep and profound”. He experimented with multitracking and overdubbing even on his earliest singles and was also able to play piano, bass and drums. His image as a sharply dressed, rugged but good looking young man with a rebellious attitude epitomized the stance of the Fifties rocker, and in death he achieved iconic status.

Cochran was born in Minnesota and moved with his family to California in the early 1950s. He was involved with music from an early age, playing in the school band and teaching himself to play blues guitar. In 1955, he formed a duet with the unrelated guitarist Hank Cochran, and when they split the following year, Cochran began a song-writing career with Jerry Capehart. His first success came when he performed the song “Twenty Flight Rock” in the movie The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield. Soon after, Liberty Records signed him to a recording contract.

Cochran was 21 when he died in April 1960 in a road accident during his British tour.

onechair-barbershop:

pure-just:

HOWLIN’ WOLF

Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 – January 10, 1976), known as Howlin’ Wolf, was an influential American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player.

With a booming voice and looming physical presence, Burnett is commonly ranked among the leading performers in electric blues; musician and critic Cub Koda declared, “no one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.” A number of songs written or popularized by Burnett—such as “Smokestack Lightnin’”, “Back Door Man”, “Killing Floor” and “Spoonful“—have become blues and blues rock standards.

At 6 feet, 6 inches (198 cm) and close to 300 pounds (136 kg), he was an imposing presence with one of the loudest and most memorable voices of all the “classic” 1950s Chicago blues singers. This rough-edged, slightly fearsome musical style is often contrasted with the less crude but still powerful presentation of his contemporary and professional rival, Muddy Waters. Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Little Walter Jacobs, and Muddy Waters are usually regarded in retrospect as the greatest blues artists who recorded for Chess in Chicago. Sam Phillips once remarked, “When I heard Howlin’ Wolf, I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’” In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him #51 on their list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”.

Kenneth ‘Von Dutch’ Howard, b.1929. Brilliant craftsman and unpleasant fella.

Von Dutch was the man who brought pin-striping as a high art from motorcycles to automobile bodies. He took his nickname from his stubbornness. “Stubborn as a Dutchman” is a by now quaint ethnic slur. But beyond stubborn, Von Dutch became insufferable. He was the quintessential cliché romantic artist, selfish inside his own vision, alienating family, friends and customers alike. Part romantic, part beatnik, part general pain in the ass, he was a racist and prima donna, he managed to irritate almost everyone who admired him—and in the best esthetic mode, somehow made them admire him more in the process.

He died in 1992, leaving two daughters. At the end, he was drinking heavily, holed up in an old Long Beach city bus. For years he lived at the museum called Movie World, Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame in Buena Park, California. He had become paranoid and he spent time elaborately engraving and painting knives and guns as well as cars.

No wonder the daughters, Lisa and Lorna were happy to sell the rights to reproduce their father’s imagery in 1996 to Michael Cassel, a maker of surf clothing, who established a company called Von Dutch Originals in 1999 and opened the store on Melrose Avenue a year later. He brought in a man named Tonny Sorensen who in turn hired designer Christian Audigier. Audigier worked for Diesel and Fiorucci. Casel’s notion was to tap the hot rod set; but Sorensen and Audigier aimed at wider, fashion audience.

The art world found its way to car culture through artists like Robert Williams, who worked with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth before turning his talents to oil and canvas. In 1993 a show called “Kustom Kulture” at the Laguna Museum of Art helped start off the process of Von Dutch’s discovery by the wider public. Still, it took insight, luck or both to see that Von Dutch could be, well, exploitable. Celebrities such as Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher showed up wearing the logo caps. The whole appeal of course was explaining who Von Dutch was.

Von Dutch’s posthumous fame has amazed veterans of the car culture. “I knew Von Dutch,” one hot rod buff said not long ago, shaking his head. “I saw him drunk every day.”

[source: The Selvedge Yard]

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935), known professionally as T. E. Lawrence, was a British Army officer renowned especially for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule of 1916–18. The extraordinary breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title which was used for the 1962 film based on his World War I activities.

Lawrence was born illegitimately in Tremadog, Wales, in August 1888 to Sir Thomas Chapman and Sarah Junner, a governess who was herself illegitimate. Chapman had left his wife and first family in Ireland to live with Sarah Junner, and they called themselves Mr and Mrs Lawrence. In the summer of 1896 the Lawrences moved to Oxford, where in 1907–10 young Lawrence studied history at Jesus College, graduating with First Class Honours. He became a practicing archaeologist in the Middle East, working at various excavations with David George Hogarth and Leonard Woolley. In 1908 he joined the OUOTC (Oxford University Officer Training Corps), undergoing a two-year training course. In January 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence was co-opted by the British military to undertake a military survey of the Negev Desert while doing archaeological research.

Lawrence’s public image was due in part to American journalist Lowell Thomas’ sensationalised reportage of the revolt as well as to Lawrence’s autobiographical account, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922).

Kublai Khan (1215-1294) was a Mongolian leader who made an impact on China, not only through conquest, but also by ruling successfully. Many of the rulers before him were brutally land-hungry and apathetic to the conquered people; however, Kublai challenged the stereotypes of Mongolian rulers by investing in his newly acquired people and providing the foundations of a grand empire.

Kublai was claimed “Great Khan” in the North in 1260, developing a new type of control by surrounding himself with a variety of religious advisors. He showed tolerance towards the religions of his new subjects and because of his leniency, a relationship formed between him and his people.

Kublai Khan’s transformation from conqueror to ruler led to many developments in Chinese culture. Along with providing religious freedom, he created aid agencies, increased the use of postal stations, established paper currency, reorganized and improved roads, and expanded waterways.

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment.

At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) using reason and logic. But this stood in sharp contrast to the scepticism and lack of agreement or progress in empiricist philosophy.

Kant’s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the scepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.

He said that
”..it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us … should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.”

Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’, saying that
“Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but… let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.”

Kant published other important works on religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788), which deals with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior.

Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant’s approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime. He settled and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy. German and European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires philosophical work today.

[source: Wikipedia]