January 13, 2020 • 49 mins
This is the story of how Ferdinand Porsche, with the support of Adolph Hitler, created the Volkswagen company. We also follow the evolution of the Volkswagen Beetle.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And
while I was doing the retrospective episodes about the last
(00:24):
decade in Tech two thousand nine to two well eighteen,
because I had already done two thousand nineteen, I mentioned
the scandal around Volkswagen and the devices that were used
to help cheat on emissions testing, and it made me
realize that I haven't done full episodes about the founding
and evolution of the company. It's a company that's no
(00:45):
stranger to controversy and scandal, and it's also a company
that has created some iconic vehicles, specifically the Volkswagen Beatle.
So today I thought I would look at the story
of Volkswagen, and this is going to become more than
one episode because the company is several decades old, but
will mainly focus on Volkswagen and the Beatle for this one. Now,
(01:08):
it's always a challenge for me to figure out exactly
where I should begin with these histories, So for this one,
I thought the best thing would be to start with
the founder of the company, Ferdinand Porsche. And this is
the same Porsche whose name would grace the sports car
and luxury car company. Porsche was born in eighteen seventy
(01:29):
five in Maffersdorff, Austria, Hungary, which is in a region
that's now known as Libraric or Liberate and I apologize
I don't know the correct pronunciation, but in the Czech
Republic now. As a child, he became fascinated with technology,
and particularly with electricity. He pursued this interest he learned
(01:49):
more about mechanical systems and then as a young man,
he landed a job at an electrical company in Vienna
called Baila Eggar and Company. He was just eighteen years
old at the time. Now around that same time he
enrolled in the Imperial Technical University at Reichenburg it's now
(02:10):
the Vienna University of Technology. His affinity for tech and
his enthusiasm for the subject paid off, and he would
earn a promotion at his job to a management position
pretty early on. By eight nine seven, he was beginning
to experiment with the design and production of electric hub motors. So, yeah,
(02:33):
we get to talk about some tech, Okay, So first,
let's remind ourselves about the basics of electric motors, and
it all comes down to harnessing electromagnetic energy and making
it do mechanical work. So it's all about that interplay
between electricity and magnetism. Now, remember electromagnetic energy is one
(02:53):
of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with gravity
and then the strong and weak nuclear forces. There are
other people who hypothesize additional fundamental forces that would help
explain things that these forces don't explain in our current
understanding of the universe, but that's a topic for a
different show alright. So electric motors, essentially, it's all about magnets. Now,
(03:17):
as I'm sure you all know, magnets can either attract
or repel each other. It all depends upon the magnetic polls.
Opposite magnetic poles attract one another, so north pole attracts
to south pole. Now, if you have like poles, those
repel each other. So the north poles on two different
magnets will push against each other. And if you could
(03:39):
just harness this natural phenomenon, you can make magnets do work.
That's the basis behind the electric motor. It's also the
basis behind a lot of people's assumptions that you can
use magnets to create some sort of perpetual motion machine,
but there are other factors at play that prevent that,
largely things like friction. Again, that's a topic for another show.
(04:00):
So a very simple electric motor has a few basic components.
One is a field magnet. It's typically a permanent magnet.
This is the stationary magnet or pair of magnets that
is positioned so that the north and south poles of
the magnet are on either side of an armature that's
positioned in the middle. So think of like a horseshoe
(04:23):
magnet right has a north pole in the south pole,
think of it holding it up right like a U,
and then think about suspending an axle in between the
north and south poles right in the middle. Now attached
to the armature are a couple of other elements that
I'll get to in a moment. The armature itself is
a rotor, which means it can rotate, so unlike the magnet,
(04:46):
which is stationary, the rotor can actually rotate. And it's
also an electro magnet, meaning you have some sort of
conductive wire wrapped around a core running a current through
that conductive wire generates a magnetic field. This is a
basic feature of electromagnetism, where running a current through a
conductive wire that's in a coil will generate a magnetic field. Also,
(05:09):
if you bring a coil of conductive wire within a
magnetic field, that will induce a current to flow through
that wire, at least briefly. A fluctuating magnetic field will
cause it to do that repeatedly um and make a
steady flow of current. Well, the magnetic field of the
electro magnet interacts with the magnetic field of the field magnet.
(05:30):
The north pole of the electro magnet gets repelled by
the north pole of the field magnet, and the north
pole of the electro magnet would be attracted to the
south pole of the field magnet. And since the rotor
can rotate, the armature will twist. As a result of
this natural effect, the magnetic field creates a rotational motion
(05:50):
in the armature. Ah, you say, but what happens when
this twist is complete? I mean when in the north
and south poles of the two magnets just match up,
and thus your motor would just stop turning. I mean,
the north pole of the electro magnet would be in
in uh, you know, near the south pole of the
field magnet, and then it would just stay there because
(06:12):
that's where the attraction is. So wouldn't it just lock
into place, and wouldn't the wires get twisted up? So
even if it did keep rotating, it would eventually have
to stop. Anyway, Well, if all you had done is
rat to wire around a rotating you know, electro magnet
and turned it on, then yes, it would stop. It
wouldn't be able to continue rotating, or the wires would
(06:35):
twist up and stop it that way, But you have
to add in an extra element, and you get what
most electric motors are based off of. And so this
element is called a commutator. All right, Now, this is
a little tricky to describe in an audio podcast, but
stick with me. So imagine that you have a copper
(06:56):
band like a copper ring, but it's a wide band.
Only we're not gonna put it on our finger and
make it turn green. So instead, imagine that you've got
this wide ring band ring and you cut it in half,
so now you've got two half bands. And imagine that
you shave a bit off the ends of the bands
(07:17):
or the half bands, so that they don't quite make
a whole ring anymore when you bring them together. And
then you take your armature, which is just the right
diameter for these half bands to fit on the outside,
and you attach those half bands, so there's a little
gap in between these half bands, but otherwise they are
clasping either side of this armature. Now, the electromagnetic wire
(07:43):
is attached to those copper plates, which means the wire
and the plates are all part of the same rotating piece.
They are not connected to the larger device, so they
aren't going to get tangled up right because they're not
actually making contact with any of the state actionary elements
of the motor. The armature and commutator can rotate within
(08:06):
this uh this motor and the motor itself has another
piece called the brush. The brush is stationary. You can
think of that as an even larger ring that fits
right around where the copper plates are, and it has
elements that can reach out and brush those copper plates
through which electric current can flow through. So when you
(08:28):
turn it on, electricity flows through the brush and then
makes contact with these copper plates, which generates the current
that goes through the electro magnet and then that generates
a magnetic field, and thus it needs to turn because
of the field magnet. Now the current is of the
direct current variety. This is the type of current that
(08:50):
moves in one direction only. This is your basic electric motor.
There are some that work with alternating current, but we're
specifically talking about d C here. So this is the
type that comes from a battery. And as the current
moves through the brush, the copper plates of the commutator
transfer the electricity to the wire and the electro magnet
that generates the magnetic field it interacts with the field
(09:12):
of the permanent magnet. The armature rotates, but through this
rotation the copper plates change positions, they flip, and you know,
it's not a full connected ring. There's that little gap
in either side, so there's a moment where the plates
are not making full contact with those sides of the brush.
(09:34):
So when the commutator turns, this has the same effect
as the direction of electricity changing. Because the orientation of
the rest of the circuit has changed, the electricity is
still flowing in the same direction that the effect of
the circuit is as if it's an alternating current That
means the magnetic pole of the electro magnet flips as well.
(09:55):
That means the process will repeat itself because what used
to be the north pole of electro magnet is now
the south pole, and the south pole is not going
to get along with the south pole the field magnet.
It's gonna get repelled, so it again twists. That whole
twisting rotating process repeats itself and again. As it continues
(10:16):
to turn, the copper plates rotate and the direction of
electricity switches again, and this happens over and over. The
poles of the electro magnet keep switching, and that ends
up creating this magnetic force between the field magnet and
the electro magnet, and it perpetuates this rotational motion. So
(10:38):
that's the basis of an electric motor. You essentially get
a generator if you reverse this, where you're using the
rotation of the different elements to generate electricity through the
conductive wire. But that's matter for another time. So an
electric hub motor is a motor that's mounted on the
(10:59):
inside of the hub of a wheel. The motor is
stationary with regards to the vehicle frame and the end
of the rotor attaches to some element on the inside
of the wheels hub, and the rotational force of the
motor transfers to the inside of the wheels hub, so
that the wheel of the vehicle begins to rotate. This
(11:19):
is a type of direct drive motor and you frequently
see it in stuff like electric bikes and e bike
conversion kits. So Porsche was making vehicles that used motors
that were inside the wheels of the vehicles themselves, and
this created the rotational force necessary to make those vehicles go,
and he would raise them against other similarly designed vehicles
(11:41):
in the late nineteenth century, and frequently he won. So
Porsche then went on to join a company called hoff
Vagen Fabric Jacob Loner and Company. And I apologize for
my terrible pronunciation. This was part of the Austro Hungarian Army.
The army itself own this company, and he was one
(12:02):
of the first employees in a brand new department within
the company that developed electric cars. And at that department
he developed a vehicle called the Sea Point to Phaeton,
which he designed as the P one and P one.
The P and P one stands for Porsche, so technically
you could argue this was the first Porsche. It looks
(12:25):
a bit like the type of carriage that you would
typically see pulled behind a horse, except this one didn't
need the horse. But yeah, you look at and you're like, oh, yeah,
that looks kind of like a horse drawn carriage, just
there's no horse there. One interesting historical note about Ferdinand
Porsche involves another Ferdinand. This one would be the Archduke
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Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Back in nineteen o two, Porsche
was drafted into army service, which was sort of a
matter of course at the time, and he happened to
serve as the chauffeur to the arched Duke for a
short while. This is the same Archduke who on June
nineteen fourteen was assassinated and his death precipitated World War One.
(13:11):
And I know that sounds like a tangent for a
show about Volkswagen, but I would argue, there's actually a
through line that we can apply with the benefit of hindsight.
So let's get back to Porsche. After his service and
after working for loner, Porsche switched companies again. He joined
the Austro Daimelric company in nineteen o six. He worked
there for nearly twenty years, and during World War One
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was part of engineering teams who developed aircraft engines for
the Austrian Emperor, as well as heavy land vehicles designed
to pull artillery. After the war, he would then join
the Daimler Motor and Gazelle Shaft Company in Stuttgart in
nineteen twenty three. He worked on many projects, including a
Mercedes the introduced the supercharger. Uh. This is a mechanism
(13:58):
that supplies high pressure air to the cylinders of a
combustion engine in order to increase the efficiency of combustion
to get a bigger bang, which is the secret to
internal combustion engines. It's really a series of controlled explosions
within cylinders that push out pistons. I'll talk more about
that a little later in this episode. Porsche worked as
(14:19):
a manager at Daimler for several years until nineteen thirty one.
Then he would leave to found his own company named Porsche. Well,
technically it had a much longer name, but I've butchered
enough germantic pronunciation up to this point, so I'm not
going to try that one. Porsche's son, Ferdinand anton Erst Porsche,
(14:41):
would work with him at this new company and his
son would play an important part in developing the first Volkswagen.
But something else would also play a pivotal part in
this story, and that someone was Adolph Hitler. Hitler was
Chancellor of Germany in nineteen thirty four and he issued
(15:01):
a challenge to the automotive manufacturers in Germany. He wanted
a German company to design a vehicle that could be
mass produced easily and cheaply enough to be affordable to
the average family in Germany. Now, ideally, a German family
consisting of a husband, wife and three children would be
able to use such a car to travel throughout the
(15:24):
country on the new Autobahn. The price of the car
should be no more than nine hundred reich Mark that
was the currency of the time, and a national savings
plan was proposed that would allow citizens to put money
toward the vehicle so they would be able to save money.
Specifically for one of these it was to be the
(15:45):
People's car, thus the Volkswagen or Folkswagen you can think
of that as folks Wagon. The father and son Porsche
team decided to take the engineering challenge and to submit
a design for consideration. So the two got to work.
They came up with an idea that would essentially be
(16:06):
a a predecessor to the Volkswagen Beetle, and they submitted
it to the German government. Their work earned them a contract.
Hitler himself praised Porsche in n five at the German
Auto Show, stating that the design met his vision for
what a people's car would be and that the path
(16:26):
had been laid to make that design a reality. This
design would lead to the production of the first volks
Folkswagen UH the Type one or Folkswagen Beetle. The curvy
car which housed its engine in the back of the
vehicle rather than under the hood in the front, would
become a true icon. Porsche would get considerable support from
(16:48):
the German government in order to manufacture this car. There
was no manufacturing facility in Germany that was suitable for
the task at that time, so they were gonna have
to build a new one. And more over, the site
for the factory needed to be in a location that
was easily accessible. It had to be close to major
areas of transportation in order to get materials and then
(17:09):
to ship cars back out when they were done. So,
the team began to search for a suitable location, trying
to find one that would be accessible by boat through
a canal system, by vehicle via the Autobahn, and by
railway lines. They settled on a location near a medieval
castle named Wolfsburg. They built not just a factory, but
(17:29):
an entire small city to support the people who would
be working in the factory, so it would include homes
and later more insidious structures. Get to that. The name
of the city was originally Statt derk KDF Vaughan, or
City of the KDF Car. KDF itself stood for craft
(17:52):
Dutch Freudough, which means strength through joy, and it referred
to a Nazi organization that promoted a vision of wealthy
and advanced Germany. Things would not turn out to be
strength through joy, however. I'll explain more in just a moment,
but first let's take a quick break. Money to build
(18:19):
out this manufacturing facility came largely from trade unions in Germany.
The unions actually provided so much of the cash that
was needed to get the factory up and running that
to this day they still hold some sway in the company.
Union representatives still sit on the supervisory board for Volkswagen today,
and the company is not allowed to just move production
(18:41):
from one plant to another without their express approval. First,
the manufacturing facility itself got the name Volkswagen Plant, probably
because Porsche didn't want to call it the Porsche Plant. Now,
as the facility was being built, things were changing rapidly
in Germany. The Nazi Party essentially took over the unions
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and made them part of the German Labor Front, the
party's own union organization, and it was under this version
of Germany's unions that Volkswagen the company would come into being.
Germany would also start to invade other countries in Europe,
and World War Two happened as a result of that. Now,
due to all these changes, the facility would actually produce
(19:21):
relatively few cars, rather than the mass produced vehicles that
had been envisioned for every German family throughout the country.
It would actually end up building fewer than seven hundred
Volkswagen Beetles before World War Two really started to ramp up.
Most of those would end up going to influential German families,
particularly members of the Nazi Party, um not the common
(19:45):
German resident. Hitler notably received the first convertible off the
manufacturing floor. The savings plan that had been proposed, the
one that promised to give the average German a chance
at owning a vehicle of his or her own, was
pretty much out the window as the company shut down
all of civilian production during the war. Most of Volkswagen's
(20:07):
plants assets were actually directed towards producing equipment and munitions
for the German armed forces in support of the Access
Powers during the war, and that included stuff like land
mines and tank parts. Also, something that absolutely should not
be forgotten that we have to address is that much
of the labor at this facility was forced labor. In fact,
(20:33):
a lot of the early workforce came from Soviet prisoners
of war who were forced to work at Volkswagen's manufacturing facility.
Over time, the company would put other prisoners of war,
also displaced people essentially kidnapped people from Eastern Europe, and
concentration camp inmates all to work at the facility. The
site became home to a concentration camp called our Bites
(20:56):
Dworff in nineteen forty two. Ultimately, three more con centration
camps would be added to the campus and eight forced
labor camps as well. As the war progressed. At one point,
forced labor made up sixty percent of the total workforce
for the company, so it's impossible to describe the labor
practices of Volkswagen as anything other than deplorable during this time.
(21:20):
It would also be a part of Volkswagen's history that
the company avoided acknowledging officially for many decades. It would
eventually make reparations for this, but it would be many
decades before that would actually happen. The plant did manufacture
a couple of different cars specifically for military use during
this time. The first became known as the kuble Wagan,
(21:41):
which means bucket seat car. It was essentially the German
counterpart to the US general purpose military vehicle a k a.
The Jeep. Now that's not to say that the kuble
Wagon and the Jeep were similar. They were actually very
different in lots of different ways, but they were each
intended to serve a similar purpose, namely, moving people too
(22:05):
difficult to reach destinations over rough terrain, often in battle situations. Initially,
officers in the armed forces in Germany were at odds
of whether or not they should even implement the kuble Wagon,
but that prompted Hitler himself to step in and demand
Porsche's vehicle be put into use. Also, it was in
many ways of variation on the Volkswagen Beetle. Although Porsche
(22:28):
would work with other designers to solve problems like reducing
the weight of the vehicle while still achieving the performance
that the military was demanding, the kubel Wagen was a
really lightweight vehicle and that was mandated by the German government.
It was one of the requirements. The most common version
of this vehicle did not have four wheel drive, but
(22:50):
it did have a limited slip differential. So what what
the heck is that? Alright? So a differential is a
gear assembly, and its purpose is to allow one wheel
on an axle to turn at a different speed than
the other wheel on the axle. So you've got these
two wheels. They're on the same axle, but you want
(23:12):
them to be able to rotate at different speeds. Now,
if you're someone like me who doesn't know a ton
about cars, you might ask, why the heck would you
want two wheels on the same axle to turn at
different speeds? And the answer is physics. Use silly person. Okay, So,
if you're traveling in a straight line. You know you're
on level ground, You're just going down a straight road.
(23:33):
You wouldn't want your wheels turning at different speeds. That
would be kind of disastrous. You want them all rotating
it essentially the same speed as you go down the road.
But of course roads are not perfectly straight. They have
curves that you have to navigate, and this is where
a differential is important. See a four wheeled vehicle, if
you've got one of those, If you got driving a
(23:54):
standard car, that means two wheels are going to be
on the inside of any given curve, and two wheels
are going to be on the outside of any given curve,
and the wheels on the inside have to travel a
shorter distance than the wheels on the outside. Right, the
further out from the middle of the curve you get,
the greater the distance you're going to cover in the
(24:15):
same amount of time, which means the wheels on the
outside curve would need to rotate faster than those on
the inside in order to make a smooth turn. Otherwise
you would have an enormous amount of tension build up
on that outside wheel and you would either get some
skipping with the wheel or the axle itself would break
apart from the pressure the incredible tension that was being
(24:38):
built up. So differentials allow wheels to spin at different
rotational speeds, and they do this with a series of
interlocking gears, and open differential is the simplest form of this,
and it supplies an equal amount of torque or rotational
force to each of the wheels on an axle. But
that can sometimes be a problem particul sularly if you're
(25:00):
working with an off road vehicle like the Kuble Wagon.
Those vehicles can sometimes end up in places where one
of the wheels on an axle has little to no
contact with the ground. And if that happens to be
one of the wheels that's actually you know, connected to
that drive train. Because remember it's a two wheel drive vehicle.
Only the front or back wheels are connected to one another.
(25:22):
The other two wheels are independent of each other. In
the case of the Kuble Wagon, it's the rear wheels.
It was another real rear wheel drive vehicle. But if
you have one of those two rear wheels up in
the air, it's just gonna spin, right. If it's just
an open differential, that torque is still being applied to it,
it's spinning and that energy is going to waste. Limited
(25:42):
slip differentials allow a car to apply more torque to
a non slipping wheel. So if one wheel is spinning
more or less freely, then more torque can go to
the wheel that has greater traction and potentially dislodge the
vehicle from whatever position it's stuck in. Not to describe
it in further detail would be pretty tricky for an
(26:03):
audio podcast, so instead, I recommend you look up how
differentials work on how stuff Works dot com. That's my
old employer. I don't have any association with them anymore,
but I still love that website. It's still an amazing
resource and it does a great job at describing how
differentials work and gives illustrations and explains in greater details.
(26:27):
So go check that out. But for our episode, the
important thing to note is that the limited slip differential
allowed the lightweight Kuble Wagon to perform nearly as well
as the four wheel drive vehicles could in off road situations. Now,
there were a few of these produced that did have
four wheel drive, but in general, Porsche found that the
process of creating a four wheel drive Kuble wagon was
(26:50):
pretty expensive and it was hard to justify because you
only got relatively minor improvements in performance capability. So, in
other words, the the hay out was less than the
investment you were putting in, so very few were actually
made that were four wheel drive vehicles. The Volkswagen Company
would design and produce another military vehicle during World War
(27:12):
Two called the schvim Wagan, which, as the name probably
hints to you, was an amphibious vehicle, meaning it could
go from land to water and water to land. At first,
the company tried to rely upon the Kobo Wagan's body
as the basis for this vehicle, but designer Irvin Kommenda
found that the chassis was hindering the vehicle's movement through water.
(27:35):
It just wasn't working. The Swimwagan would get a different
kind of vehicle body that actually look more like a
boat or honestly, I think if you were to pull
the top off a Schwemwagan, it would look like you
were left with a bathtub on wheels. The schvim Wagan
had a propeller that was on the back of the
(27:56):
vehicle as well. It was actually on a hinge, so
you can have it flipped up when it was just
in regular land use mode, and then when you went
into the water, you could flip down the propeller and
it would engage in an extension to the vehicle's drive train,
and the drive train would provide the rotational power to
the propeller. It could only go forward. You could not
(28:17):
move the propeller in reverse. And that is why Germany
issued oars to Schwimwagan drivers or pilots or captains or
whatever they were called. Anyway, they got oars as well
in case they ever had to go backwards. In y one,
Ferdinand Porsche's son in law, Anton pH became the manager
(28:39):
of the Volkswagen factory, and he had been a member
of the Nazi Party since nineteen thirty three. He would
actually end up being inducted into the s S before
the end of World War Two. He was in charge
of the Volkswagen Facility uh And and most of the
operations that saw the company make use of forced labor
(29:00):
and the construction of concentration camps. He was also the
head of a group of reserve soldiers who worked for Volkswagen,
and when Allied forces made their way into Germany towards
the end of World War Two, he would command the
soldiers and he also ultimately fled to his father in
law's estate, Ferdinand Porsche's estate in Austria UH. In the process,
(29:22):
he also made sure to transfer about one point four
million dollars worth of reich Mark from the company Coffers
to his own personal accounts. At the end of World
War Two, both Fernand Porsche and his son Faery Porsche
Uh that's you know, the other Ferdinand Porsche, as well
(29:43):
as Anton Pish were arrested and held by French authorities.
Fairy was released after six months, so Porsche the younger
was let out after half a year. But Porsche the
elder and Anton were a different story. They were in
prison for about two years but were ultimately set free.
As well. As for the manufacturing facility, much of it
(30:07):
was destroyed during World War Two. The fact that it
was a manufacturing center that played an important role in
producing material for German forces meant it was also a
prime bombing target for the Allies. After the war, the
British took control of the facility and they had the
opportunity to essentially liquidate everything, sell off everything, but instead
(30:32):
they decided to reconstruct the facility. They decided that the
vehicles themselves had value. A British Army officer named Major
Ivan Hurst was in charge of this operation. He was
the one who was convinced that the Volkswagen Type one
or Beatle had real value. First, however, he had a
(30:54):
small matter of disarming an unexploded bomb that had broke
and through the roof of the manufacturing plant and was
stuck between production equipment, So that was scary. The facility
would get a new name, and by that I mean
it was actually an old name. It became known as
Volksburg or Wolfsburg, after the nearby medieval castle. Hurst lobbied
(31:19):
for the British government to order twenty thousand of the
Volkswagen Type one two uh end up using them in
various official capacities, and the government ultimately agreed. By the
end of nineteen forty five, the factory had made around
seventeen hundred of the cars and it was starting to
ramp up production slowly. By nine the plant was finally
(31:43):
mass producing the vehicle for which it had been intended,
the Volkswagen Beetle or Type one. The British would hand
over control of the company to the government of West
Germany in nineteen forty nine. For the younger folks out
there in the audience, Germany at one point was split
it into two countries. For many decades you had East Germany,
(32:04):
which was a communist country and West Germany, which wasn't.
And the company would pay a licensing fee to the
Porsche Company for the rights to produce the Type one
or Beetle. The two companies, Volkswagen and Porsche would be
linked together through a relationship that's frankly so legally complicated.
I really can't get a grip on it, but they
(32:26):
would remain linked for up to today. So let's talk
about the Volkswagen Beetle a little bit. So the car
would become a true staple in Germany. In fact, by
nine more than half of all the passenger cars produced
in Germany were Volkswagen Beetles. The cars were truly iconic.
(32:48):
There was even a series of Disney films in which
a Volkswagen Beetle was the title character that would be
Herbie the love Bug, and the word bug was often
used as a nickname for the VW Beetle as well. Now,
the Beetle has a pretty distinctive curvy, almost bulbous shape,
but not that distinctive. What I mean by that is
(33:09):
that before the VW Beetle, there was actually a car
called the Tatra V five seventy. It was produced by
a check automaker named Hans Ledvinka, and the VW Beetle
didn't just look a little like the older Tatra V
five seventy. It looked a lot like it, and it
also featured some of the same engineering innovations. Like the Tatra.
(33:32):
The Beetle had a rear mounted and air cooled engine,
and Porsche himself essentially admitted to lifting some design ideas
from the Tatra vehicle. Before World War two broke out,
Tatra was bringing a lawsuit against Porsche because of this,
but then Germany invaded Czechoslovakia or what was then Czechoslovakia,
(33:54):
and that brought all the lawsuits to an end. Once
World War two was over, the matter was revisited it
and ultimately Volkswagen would pay a few million Deutsche marks
to Tatra income compensation for the use of intellectual property.
Let's say the financial setback is part of the reason
that Volkswagen kept producing the Beetle for as long as
(34:15):
it did. It remained on the market and in the
production line for so long because the company literally couldn't
afford to design a lot of new vehicles, and so
the Beetle would remain in production longer than you typically
would see a car be in production. And when we
come back, I'll talk more about the Beetle and it's
design features, but first let's take another quick break. Okay,
(34:45):
So the engine in a Volkswagen Beetle, the Volkswagen Type one,
is a type called a flat four air cooled engine.
So what the heck does that mean? Well, let's start
with the flat four. Now, that essentially refers to the
arrangement of the cylinders for this internal combustion engine. The
(35:06):
cylinders are where a mixture of fuel and air get
compressed before a spark plug ignites that mixture and that
creates the explosion that forces the piston that's that's compressing
this gas back out to the far end of its stroke.
This motion, in turn, provides the force that turns a crankshaft.
(35:28):
Now I've covered the basics of car engines before, so
I'm not going to go into much further detail here.
But the cylinders are where explosive force gets harnessed into
doing useful work of making a vehicle go. In a
typical engine, like an inline engine, the cylinders are arranged
so that if you were looking at the engine as
it was mounted in the car, everything is vertical. The
(35:49):
cylinders are up and down. The pistons move up and
down according to your frame of reference. So again that's
called an inline or straight internal combustion engine with the
four or however many cylinders in line with one another.
But the Volkswagen Beetles engine is a flat four. Now
that means the cylinders are in a horizontal position. You
(36:11):
have two on either side of the center of the engine,
so you have two cylinders that are essentially pointing to
the left and two that are pointing to the right,
and the pistons in the cylinders opposite each other move
in sync at least with the Volkswagen's engine. So the
piston in the cylinders closest to the front of the engine,
(36:32):
like if you were looking at the engine from the front,
the two cylinders on the cylinder on the left and
right that are closest to you, those pistons would be
moving in and out in sync with one another. So
not alternating, they would be doing it together. They'd both
be coming in and both be moving out at the
same time through each cycle. The two cylinders behind that,
(36:53):
the ones that are towards the back of the engine
from your frame of reference, would also be moving in
sync with each other. Now, the front cylinders and the
back cylinders would alternate, so the left and right would
be going in while the left and right in the
back would be going out. Uh, that's the way they
(37:14):
would alternate from your perspective. But otherwise you I hope
you can kind of visualize what I'm saying. And the
whole point of this is that the motion of the
cylinders or the motion of the pistons really are what
transfer energy to the crank shaft and power the drive train. Now,
as for the air cooled part of this air cooled
you know, four flat engine, Well, cooling an engine is
(37:37):
really important because, as you might imagine, if you have
a machine that relies upon harnessing explosions, that machine can
get pretty hot, and as things heat up, they can
expand or even fail Outright, So stuff gets hot beyond
whatever the operational tolerances, and then you've got a mechanical
(37:58):
failure just waiting to happen. So you have to have
some way to pull that heat away from the engine
and to keep the engine at operational levels. There are
a couple of different ways to do this, and air
cooled is probably the most basic method of doing it. Typically,
the engine casing has some fins that emerge from it.
(38:18):
These fins create a lot of surface area, so heat
moves from the engine out towards the fins, and then
air passes over those fins, and as the air passes
over it starts to take away some of that heat,
allowing the heat to dissipate. Most of your heat is
actually lost through exhaust, not through the fins, but the
fins do provide additional means to dissipate heat from the engine. Now,
(38:42):
this works pretty well for smaller engines uh and it
can even work in larger engines if those are vehicles
that are being operated in cold climates. So let's say
that you add a really big snowplow, Well, you might
have an engine that's air cooled, because presumably you're only
operating the snow plow when it's cold, when it's snowed.
(39:03):
Lots of motorcycles used this type of engine cooling method,
though more and more are moving more towards you know,
liquid cooling mechanisms as a port posed to air cooling anyway.
The engine for the Type one Volkswagens, the original version,
was an eleven hundred c C engine. Now c C
stands for cubic centimeter and it describes the volume or
(39:26):
capacity of an engine. It's also sometimes called engine displacement
because it specifically is referring to the volume of space
that the pistons within the cylinders are displacing, and you
measure it by going from the top dead center as
in the furthest out a piston gets from the interior
(39:47):
of its cylinder to the bottom dead center, the full
extent of the piston extending down into the cylinder, and
that tells you the volume of your engine. And you
also have to do that with all the cylinders, like
you have to you have to add up all the
cylinders together to get the full volume. So that would
(40:10):
mean that the Volkswagen Type one that with the original
engine would have cylinders that each had displacement of two
hundred seventy five cubic centimeters because it had four cylinders
and four times to seventy five eleven hundred. Now, we
in the United States often refer to engine displacement in
leaders as opposed to cubic centimeters. So how does that translate. Well, roughly,
(40:33):
you can say that a one thousand cc engine is
one leader, So in this case, you could say an
eleven hundred cc engine would be equivalent to a one
point one leader engine. Engine capacity plays a role in
an engine's outputs, such as torque, power, and mileage. Generally speaking,
the power output of an engine is directly proportional to
(40:56):
its engine capacity or volume. But the bigger volume, the
more fuel the engine will burn through in a given
amount of time. So mileage tends to suffer as engine
volume increases. It's a bit of a balance, and there
are different technologies that help mitigate that in different ways.
But again that's another episode. So the Volkswagen Beetles engine,
(41:17):
the original version wasn't much of a powerhouse, but the
car itself was small and UH didn't need a whole
lot of power to to have it put around. The
original version was a twenty five horsepower engine, and horse
power is a measurement of the rate at which work
is done. UH it compares the amount of work and
engine is capable of doing against the amount of work
(41:40):
a typical draft horse could do. Have to do a
full episode to explain stuff like horsepower at some point too,
I suppose. But the engine's output could push the original
Beetle up to a top speed of around a hundred
kilometers per hour, which was one of Hitler's goals, and
that's about sixty two miles per hour. It would take
about half a minute to accelerate from a full stop
(42:03):
to top speed, so it wasn't exactly a speed demon now.
As I've mentioned earlier, the Beatles engine mounting was in
the rear of the vehicle, not the front where you
would find it in most cars. The Beetle was a
rear wheel drive vehicle as well, so that means the
back two wheels were the ones getting power. They're actually
getting rotational force. The engine provided the force needed to
(42:27):
turn those back wheels of the car, and the front
of the car, where the engine would be in most vehicles,
was used to store luggage. That was what would normally
be the trunk or boot of a standard car. There
was also a small area for luggage and other stuff
behind the back seat in the in the car, not
a whole lot of space, but a little bit. The
(42:47):
original Beetle was also called the split screen Beetle because
the rear windshield of these original Beetles that rolled off
the assembly line back in nineteen were actually two panel
that were split by the windshield frame itself, so you
had a little, you know, strip of metal right down
the middle of the windshield holding these two frames in place.
(43:09):
After nineteen fifty three, the company ditched the split backwind
shield design, and the cars from nineteen fifty three to
nineteen fifty six had an oval shaped wind shield, and
then the ones after nineteen fifty six went to a
larger rectangular windshield for the back. That became the standard
from that point moving forward. There were several variations of
(43:32):
the Volkswagen Type one. One of them didn't see much
widespread use, but it was a necessity during wartime, and
that was a wood burning Volkswagen. It's a type of
producer gas car. This type of car would use wood
and would heat the wood up to very high temperatures
like around fourteen hundred degrees celsius or two thousand, five
(43:55):
hundred fifty degrees fahrenheit. And at that temperature, the wood
decomposes to a combustible gas. That combustible gas would be
fed into the car's cylinders much like a conventional petrol
type of fuel would be, and it would then ignite
and create the explosions, and so you would still have
an internal combustion engine, but instead of running on gasoline
(44:17):
or petrol, you were using you know, gasified wood. Cars
with these engines had large gasification units attached them, typically
to the back of the vehicle, sometimes even trailing behind
in its own little trailer, and there was usually a
pipe that was running from the gasification unit over the
(44:38):
length of the vehicle, feeding into the car's engine. Uh.
They look a little odd, to say the least. After
the war, when gasoline became available, these things pretty much vanished. Now,
in the case of the Volkswagen Beetle, they didn't have
to have a pipe run the entire length of the
car because again the engine was in the back. So
(45:00):
mounting a gasification chamber on the back of the vehicle
just meant that you could supply the gas directly to
the engine without having to run a pipe through the
length of the vehicle. More conventional variations on the Beetle
included the Beatle Cabriolet, which was a convertible. Beetle had
a soft top uh and numerous other tweaks to the design.
(45:23):
It wasn't just that it had a soft top as
opposed to the hard top Beatles. There were other differences
as well. But before introducing the Beetle to the American market,
Volkswagen began to install heftier engines that provided a bit
more oomph. So Beatles would come in engine sizes that
range from the original eleven hundred ccs up to sixteen
hundred ccs also known as one point six Leaders. In
(45:47):
nineteen fifty eight, an American advertising agency called Doyle dan
burn Bach launched an ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle,
and it was called Think Small and The ad featured
a mostly blank page with a small photograph of a
VW Beetle in it. At the base of the page
was a short rundown of the car's features, worded in
(46:08):
a way that was a bit self deprecating and humorous.
It became one of the most successful ad campaigns of
the twentieth century. A decade later, Disnety release that movie
I was talking about earlier Herbie the love Bug. In
that comedy, a race car driver discovers that a nineteen
sixty three Volkswagen Beetle has its own personality and a
mind of its own. And it's a cute little movie,
(46:31):
and it spawned several sequels, and it also helped boost
the Beatles profile. That year marked when the U S
would become the home fortent of the Volkswagen Beetles produced
by the company. In ninety two, the Beatle overtook the
venerable Model t Ford to become the best selling car
of all time. Uh it no longer holds that title
(46:54):
as I understand it, but it did at one point.
The Volkswagen Beetle remained in production until nine seventy nine
in Germany, which is pretty darn phenomenal. It would be
continued to be produced in Mexico. Part of the reason
why the Beetle was discontinued was that over time, emissions
standards were getting more restrictive in various parts of the world,
(47:18):
and the Beatle performance just didn't meet up to those standards.
But in Mexico those restrictions did not uh evolve quite
as quickly, and so for a much longer time it
was being produced out of Mexico. So for a while,
if you were determined to get a Volkswagen Beetle, you
could still get one, even after nineteen seventy nine. You
(47:40):
could get a new one. Even after nineteen seventy nine,
it would just be one that was produced in Mexico
as opposed to in Germany. Anyway, there were changes over
the course of the entire run of the Volkswagen Beetle
from nine to nineteen seventy nine, but overall it stayed
pretty consistent. Now and then next episode, we're going to
(48:01):
talk about some of the other vehicles that Volkswagen produced
throughout its history, and we'll also look at the New Beatle,
which is no longer new, but it was so called
the New Beatle when when debuted, as well as the
VW Beetle final Edition. So that's a bit of foreshadowing,
and also the controversy surrounding that in missions scandal that
(48:22):
I mentioned at the top of this episode, not to
mention other elements that play into Volkswagen's history. Not all
of it is happy and not all of it is positive,
but it's all fascinating stuff. So that wraps up this
first episode about Volkswagen. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
(48:42):
If you have any suggestions or requests or comments or anything,
you can reach out to me on social media. The
handle for our podcast on both Twitter and Facebook is
text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I heart
(49:03):
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And
while I was doing the retrospective episodes about the last
(00:24):
decade in Tech two thousand nine to two well eighteen,
because I had already done two thousand nineteen, I mentioned
the scandal around Volkswagen and the devices that were used
to help cheat on emissions testing, and it made me
realize that I haven't done full episodes about the founding
and evolution of the company. It's a company that's no
(00:45):
stranger to controversy and scandal, and it's also a company
that has created some iconic vehicles, specifically the Volkswagen Beatle.
So today I thought I would look at the story
of Volkswagen, and this is going to become more than
one episode because the company is several decades old, but
will mainly focus on Volkswagen and the Beatle for this one. Now,
(01:08):
it's always a challenge for me to figure out exactly
where I should begin with these histories, So for this one,
I thought the best thing would be to start with
the founder of the company, Ferdinand Porsche. And this is
the same Porsche whose name would grace the sports car
and luxury car company. Porsche was born in eighteen seventy
(01:29):
five in Maffersdorff, Austria, Hungary, which is in a region
that's now known as Libraric or Liberate and I apologize
I don't know the correct pronunciation, but in the Czech
Republic now. As a child, he became fascinated with technology,
and particularly with electricity. He pursued this interest he learned
(01:49):
more about mechanical systems and then as a young man,
he landed a job at an electrical company in Vienna
called Baila Eggar and Company. He was just eighteen years
old at the time. Now around that same time he
enrolled in the Imperial Technical University at Reichenburg it's now
(02:10):
the Vienna University of Technology. His affinity for tech and
his enthusiasm for the subject paid off, and he would
earn a promotion at his job to a management position
pretty early on. By eight nine seven, he was beginning
to experiment with the design and production of electric hub motors. So, yeah,
(02:33):
we get to talk about some tech, Okay, So first,
let's remind ourselves about the basics of electric motors, and
it all comes down to harnessing electromagnetic energy and making
it do mechanical work. So it's all about that interplay
between electricity and magnetism. Now, remember electromagnetic energy is one
(02:53):
of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with gravity
and then the strong and weak nuclear forces. There are
other people who hypothesize additional fundamental forces that would help
explain things that these forces don't explain in our current
understanding of the universe, but that's a topic for a
different show alright. So electric motors, essentially, it's all about magnets. Now,
(03:17):
as I'm sure you all know, magnets can either attract
or repel each other. It all depends upon the magnetic polls.
Opposite magnetic poles attract one another, so north pole attracts
to south pole. Now, if you have like poles, those
repel each other. So the north poles on two different
magnets will push against each other. And if you could
(03:39):
just harness this natural phenomenon, you can make magnets do work.
That's the basis behind the electric motor. It's also the
basis behind a lot of people's assumptions that you can
use magnets to create some sort of perpetual motion machine,
but there are other factors at play that prevent that,
largely things like friction. Again, that's a topic for another show.
(04:00):
So a very simple electric motor has a few basic components.
One is a field magnet. It's typically a permanent magnet.
This is the stationary magnet or pair of magnets that
is positioned so that the north and south poles of
the magnet are on either side of an armature that's
positioned in the middle. So think of like a horseshoe
(04:23):
magnet right has a north pole in the south pole,
think of it holding it up right like a U,
and then think about suspending an axle in between the
north and south poles right in the middle. Now attached
to the armature are a couple of other elements that
I'll get to in a moment. The armature itself is
a rotor, which means it can rotate, so unlike the magnet,
(04:46):
which is stationary, the rotor can actually rotate. And it's
also an electro magnet, meaning you have some sort of
conductive wire wrapped around a core running a current through
that conductive wire generates a magnetic field. This is a
basic feature of electromagnetism, where running a current through a
conductive wire that's in a coil will generate a magnetic field. Also,
(05:09):
if you bring a coil of conductive wire within a
magnetic field, that will induce a current to flow through
that wire, at least briefly. A fluctuating magnetic field will
cause it to do that repeatedly um and make a
steady flow of current. Well, the magnetic field of the
electro magnet interacts with the magnetic field of the field magnet.
(05:30):
The north pole of the electro magnet gets repelled by
the north pole of the field magnet, and the north
pole of the electro magnet would be attracted to the
south pole of the field magnet. And since the rotor
can rotate, the armature will twist. As a result of
this natural effect, the magnetic field creates a rotational motion
(05:50):
in the armature. Ah, you say, but what happens when
this twist is complete? I mean when in the north
and south poles of the two magnets just match up,
and thus your motor would just stop turning. I mean,
the north pole of the electro magnet would be in
in uh, you know, near the south pole of the
field magnet, and then it would just stay there because
(06:12):
that's where the attraction is. So wouldn't it just lock
into place, and wouldn't the wires get twisted up? So
even if it did keep rotating, it would eventually have
to stop. Anyway, Well, if all you had done is
rat to wire around a rotating you know, electro magnet
and turned it on, then yes, it would stop. It
wouldn't be able to continue rotating, or the wires would
(06:35):
twist up and stop it that way, But you have
to add in an extra element, and you get what
most electric motors are based off of. And so this
element is called a commutator. All right, Now, this is
a little tricky to describe in an audio podcast, but
stick with me. So imagine that you have a copper
(06:56):
band like a copper ring, but it's a wide band.
Only we're not gonna put it on our finger and
make it turn green. So instead, imagine that you've got
this wide ring band ring and you cut it in half,
so now you've got two half bands. And imagine that
you shave a bit off the ends of the bands
(07:17):
or the half bands, so that they don't quite make
a whole ring anymore when you bring them together. And
then you take your armature, which is just the right
diameter for these half bands to fit on the outside,
and you attach those half bands, so there's a little
gap in between these half bands, but otherwise they are
clasping either side of this armature. Now, the electromagnetic wire
(07:43):
is attached to those copper plates, which means the wire
and the plates are all part of the same rotating piece.
They are not connected to the larger device, so they
aren't going to get tangled up right because they're not
actually making contact with any of the state actionary elements
of the motor. The armature and commutator can rotate within
(08:06):
this uh this motor and the motor itself has another
piece called the brush. The brush is stationary. You can
think of that as an even larger ring that fits
right around where the copper plates are, and it has
elements that can reach out and brush those copper plates
through which electric current can flow through. So when you
(08:28):
turn it on, electricity flows through the brush and then
makes contact with these copper plates, which generates the current
that goes through the electro magnet and then that generates
a magnetic field, and thus it needs to turn because
of the field magnet. Now the current is of the
direct current variety. This is the type of current that
(08:50):
moves in one direction only. This is your basic electric motor.
There are some that work with alternating current, but we're
specifically talking about d C here. So this is the
type that comes from a battery. And as the current
moves through the brush, the copper plates of the commutator
transfer the electricity to the wire and the electro magnet
that generates the magnetic field it interacts with the field
(09:12):
of the permanent magnet. The armature rotates, but through this
rotation the copper plates change positions, they flip, and you know,
it's not a full connected ring. There's that little gap
in either side, so there's a moment where the plates
are not making full contact with those sides of the brush.
(09:34):
So when the commutator turns, this has the same effect
as the direction of electricity changing. Because the orientation of
the rest of the circuit has changed, the electricity is
still flowing in the same direction that the effect of
the circuit is as if it's an alternating current That
means the magnetic pole of the electro magnet flips as well.
(09:55):
That means the process will repeat itself because what used
to be the north pole of electro magnet is now
the south pole, and the south pole is not going
to get along with the south pole the field magnet.
It's gonna get repelled, so it again twists. That whole
twisting rotating process repeats itself and again. As it continues
(10:16):
to turn, the copper plates rotate and the direction of
electricity switches again, and this happens over and over. The
poles of the electro magnet keep switching, and that ends
up creating this magnetic force between the field magnet and
the electro magnet, and it perpetuates this rotational motion. So
(10:38):
that's the basis of an electric motor. You essentially get
a generator if you reverse this, where you're using the
rotation of the different elements to generate electricity through the
conductive wire. But that's matter for another time. So an
electric hub motor is a motor that's mounted on the
(10:59):
inside of the hub of a wheel. The motor is
stationary with regards to the vehicle frame and the end
of the rotor attaches to some element on the inside
of the wheels hub, and the rotational force of the
motor transfers to the inside of the wheels hub, so
that the wheel of the vehicle begins to rotate. This
(11:19):
is a type of direct drive motor and you frequently
see it in stuff like electric bikes and e bike
conversion kits. So Porsche was making vehicles that used motors
that were inside the wheels of the vehicles themselves, and
this created the rotational force necessary to make those vehicles go,
and he would raise them against other similarly designed vehicles
(11:41):
in the late nineteenth century, and frequently he won. So
Porsche then went on to join a company called hoff
Vagen Fabric Jacob Loner and Company. And I apologize for
my terrible pronunciation. This was part of the Austro Hungarian Army.
The army itself own this company, and he was one
(12:02):
of the first employees in a brand new department within
the company that developed electric cars. And at that department
he developed a vehicle called the Sea Point to Phaeton,
which he designed as the P one and P one.
The P and P one stands for Porsche, so technically
you could argue this was the first Porsche. It looks
(12:25):
a bit like the type of carriage that you would
typically see pulled behind a horse, except this one didn't
need the horse. But yeah, you look at and you're like, oh, yeah,
that looks kind of like a horse drawn carriage, just
there's no horse there. One interesting historical note about Ferdinand
Porsche involves another Ferdinand. This one would be the Archduke
(12:46):
Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Back in nineteen o two, Porsche
was drafted into army service, which was sort of a
matter of course at the time, and he happened to
serve as the chauffeur to the arched Duke for a
short while. This is the same Archduke who on June
nineteen fourteen was assassinated and his death precipitated World War One.
(13:11):
And I know that sounds like a tangent for a
show about Volkswagen, but I would argue, there's actually a
through line that we can apply with the benefit of hindsight.
So let's get back to Porsche. After his service and
after working for loner, Porsche switched companies again. He joined
the Austro Daimelric company in nineteen o six. He worked
there for nearly twenty years, and during World War One
(13:33):
was part of engineering teams who developed aircraft engines for
the Austrian Emperor, as well as heavy land vehicles designed
to pull artillery. After the war, he would then join
the Daimler Motor and Gazelle Shaft Company in Stuttgart in
nineteen twenty three. He worked on many projects, including a
Mercedes the introduced the supercharger. Uh. This is a mechanism
(13:58):
that supplies high pressure air to the cylinders of a
combustion engine in order to increase the efficiency of combustion
to get a bigger bang, which is the secret to
internal combustion engines. It's really a series of controlled explosions
within cylinders that push out pistons. I'll talk more about
that a little later in this episode. Porsche worked as
(14:19):
a manager at Daimler for several years until nineteen thirty one.
Then he would leave to found his own company named Porsche. Well,
technically it had a much longer name, but I've butchered
enough germantic pronunciation up to this point, so I'm not
going to try that one. Porsche's son, Ferdinand anton Erst Porsche,
(14:41):
would work with him at this new company and his
son would play an important part in developing the first Volkswagen.
But something else would also play a pivotal part in
this story, and that someone was Adolph Hitler. Hitler was
Chancellor of Germany in nineteen thirty four and he issued
(15:01):
a challenge to the automotive manufacturers in Germany. He wanted
a German company to design a vehicle that could be
mass produced easily and cheaply enough to be affordable to
the average family in Germany. Now, ideally, a German family
consisting of a husband, wife and three children would be
able to use such a car to travel throughout the
(15:24):
country on the new Autobahn. The price of the car
should be no more than nine hundred reich Mark that
was the currency of the time, and a national savings
plan was proposed that would allow citizens to put money
toward the vehicle so they would be able to save money.
Specifically for one of these it was to be the
(15:45):
People's car, thus the Volkswagen or Folkswagen you can think
of that as folks Wagon. The father and son Porsche
team decided to take the engineering challenge and to submit
a design for consideration. So the two got to work.
They came up with an idea that would essentially be
(16:06):
a a predecessor to the Volkswagen Beetle, and they submitted
it to the German government. Their work earned them a contract.
Hitler himself praised Porsche in n five at the German
Auto Show, stating that the design met his vision for
what a people's car would be and that the path
(16:26):
had been laid to make that design a reality. This
design would lead to the production of the first volks
Folkswagen UH the Type one or Folkswagen Beetle. The curvy
car which housed its engine in the back of the
vehicle rather than under the hood in the front, would
become a true icon. Porsche would get considerable support from
(16:48):
the German government in order to manufacture this car. There
was no manufacturing facility in Germany that was suitable for
the task at that time, so they were gonna have
to build a new one. And more over, the site
for the factory needed to be in a location that
was easily accessible. It had to be close to major
areas of transportation in order to get materials and then
(17:09):
to ship cars back out when they were done. So,
the team began to search for a suitable location, trying
to find one that would be accessible by boat through
a canal system, by vehicle via the Autobahn, and by
railway lines. They settled on a location near a medieval
castle named Wolfsburg. They built not just a factory, but
(17:29):
an entire small city to support the people who would
be working in the factory, so it would include homes
and later more insidious structures. Get to that. The name
of the city was originally Statt derk KDF Vaughan, or
City of the KDF Car. KDF itself stood for craft
(17:52):
Dutch Freudough, which means strength through joy, and it referred
to a Nazi organization that promoted a vision of wealthy
and advanced Germany. Things would not turn out to be
strength through joy, however. I'll explain more in just a moment,
but first let's take a quick break. Money to build
(18:19):
out this manufacturing facility came largely from trade unions in Germany.
The unions actually provided so much of the cash that
was needed to get the factory up and running that
to this day they still hold some sway in the company.
Union representatives still sit on the supervisory board for Volkswagen today,
and the company is not allowed to just move production
(18:41):
from one plant to another without their express approval. First,
the manufacturing facility itself got the name Volkswagen Plant, probably
because Porsche didn't want to call it the Porsche Plant. Now,
as the facility was being built, things were changing rapidly
in Germany. The Nazi Party essentially took over the unions
(19:01):
and made them part of the German Labor Front, the
party's own union organization, and it was under this version
of Germany's unions that Volkswagen the company would come into being.
Germany would also start to invade other countries in Europe,
and World War Two happened as a result of that. Now,
due to all these changes, the facility would actually produce
(19:21):
relatively few cars, rather than the mass produced vehicles that
had been envisioned for every German family throughout the country.
It would actually end up building fewer than seven hundred
Volkswagen Beetles before World War Two really started to ramp up.
Most of those would end up going to influential German families,
particularly members of the Nazi Party, um not the common
(19:45):
German resident. Hitler notably received the first convertible off the
manufacturing floor. The savings plan that had been proposed, the
one that promised to give the average German a chance
at owning a vehicle of his or her own, was
pretty much out the window as the company shut down
all of civilian production during the war. Most of Volkswagen's
(20:07):
plants assets were actually directed towards producing equipment and munitions
for the German armed forces in support of the Access
Powers during the war, and that included stuff like land
mines and tank parts. Also, something that absolutely should not
be forgotten that we have to address is that much
of the labor at this facility was forced labor. In fact,
(20:33):
a lot of the early workforce came from Soviet prisoners
of war who were forced to work at Volkswagen's manufacturing facility.
Over time, the company would put other prisoners of war,
also displaced people essentially kidnapped people from Eastern Europe, and
concentration camp inmates all to work at the facility. The
site became home to a concentration camp called our Bites
(20:56):
Dworff in nineteen forty two. Ultimately, three more con centration
camps would be added to the campus and eight forced
labor camps as well. As the war progressed. At one point,
forced labor made up sixty percent of the total workforce
for the company, so it's impossible to describe the labor
practices of Volkswagen as anything other than deplorable during this time.
(21:20):
It would also be a part of Volkswagen's history that
the company avoided acknowledging officially for many decades. It would
eventually make reparations for this, but it would be many
decades before that would actually happen. The plant did manufacture
a couple of different cars specifically for military use during
this time. The first became known as the kuble Wagan,
(21:41):
which means bucket seat car. It was essentially the German
counterpart to the US general purpose military vehicle a k a.
The Jeep. Now that's not to say that the kuble
Wagon and the Jeep were similar. They were actually very
different in lots of different ways, but they were each
intended to serve a similar purpose, namely, moving people too
(22:05):
difficult to reach destinations over rough terrain, often in battle situations. Initially,
officers in the armed forces in Germany were at odds
of whether or not they should even implement the kuble Wagon,
but that prompted Hitler himself to step in and demand
Porsche's vehicle be put into use. Also, it was in
many ways of variation on the Volkswagen Beetle. Although Porsche
(22:28):
would work with other designers to solve problems like reducing
the weight of the vehicle while still achieving the performance
that the military was demanding, the kubel Wagen was a
really lightweight vehicle and that was mandated by the German government.
It was one of the requirements. The most common version
of this vehicle did not have four wheel drive, but
(22:50):
it did have a limited slip differential. So what what
the heck is that? Alright? So a differential is a
gear assembly, and its purpose is to allow one wheel
on an axle to turn at a different speed than
the other wheel on the axle. So you've got these
two wheels. They're on the same axle, but you want
(23:12):
them to be able to rotate at different speeds. Now,
if you're someone like me who doesn't know a ton
about cars, you might ask, why the heck would you
want two wheels on the same axle to turn at
different speeds? And the answer is physics. Use silly person. Okay, So,
if you're traveling in a straight line. You know you're
on level ground, You're just going down a straight road.
(23:33):
You wouldn't want your wheels turning at different speeds. That
would be kind of disastrous. You want them all rotating
it essentially the same speed as you go down the road.
But of course roads are not perfectly straight. They have
curves that you have to navigate, and this is where
a differential is important. See a four wheeled vehicle, if
you've got one of those, If you got driving a
(23:54):
standard car, that means two wheels are going to be
on the inside of any given curve, and two wheels
are going to be on the outside of any given curve,
and the wheels on the inside have to travel a
shorter distance than the wheels on the outside. Right, the
further out from the middle of the curve you get,
the greater the distance you're going to cover in the
(24:15):
same amount of time, which means the wheels on the
outside curve would need to rotate faster than those on
the inside in order to make a smooth turn. Otherwise
you would have an enormous amount of tension build up
on that outside wheel and you would either get some
skipping with the wheel or the axle itself would break
apart from the pressure the incredible tension that was being
(24:38):
built up. So differentials allow wheels to spin at different
rotational speeds, and they do this with a series of
interlocking gears, and open differential is the simplest form of this,
and it supplies an equal amount of torque or rotational
force to each of the wheels on an axle. But
that can sometimes be a problem particul sularly if you're
(25:00):
working with an off road vehicle like the Kuble Wagon.
Those vehicles can sometimes end up in places where one
of the wheels on an axle has little to no
contact with the ground. And if that happens to be
one of the wheels that's actually you know, connected to
that drive train. Because remember it's a two wheel drive vehicle.
Only the front or back wheels are connected to one another.
(25:22):
The other two wheels are independent of each other. In
the case of the Kuble Wagon, it's the rear wheels.
It was another real rear wheel drive vehicle. But if
you have one of those two rear wheels up in
the air, it's just gonna spin, right. If it's just
an open differential, that torque is still being applied to it,
it's spinning and that energy is going to waste. Limited
(25:42):
slip differentials allow a car to apply more torque to
a non slipping wheel. So if one wheel is spinning
more or less freely, then more torque can go to
the wheel that has greater traction and potentially dislodge the
vehicle from whatever position it's stuck in. Not to describe
it in further detail would be pretty tricky for an
(26:03):
audio podcast, so instead, I recommend you look up how
differentials work on how stuff Works dot com. That's my
old employer. I don't have any association with them anymore,
but I still love that website. It's still an amazing
resource and it does a great job at describing how
differentials work and gives illustrations and explains in greater details.
(26:27):
So go check that out. But for our episode, the
important thing to note is that the limited slip differential
allowed the lightweight Kuble Wagon to perform nearly as well
as the four wheel drive vehicles could in off road situations. Now,
there were a few of these produced that did have
four wheel drive, but in general, Porsche found that the
process of creating a four wheel drive Kuble wagon was
(26:50):
pretty expensive and it was hard to justify because you
only got relatively minor improvements in performance capability. So, in
other words, the the hay out was less than the
investment you were putting in, so very few were actually
made that were four wheel drive vehicles. The Volkswagen Company
would design and produce another military vehicle during World War
(27:12):
Two called the schvim Wagan, which, as the name probably
hints to you, was an amphibious vehicle, meaning it could
go from land to water and water to land. At first,
the company tried to rely upon the Kobo Wagan's body
as the basis for this vehicle, but designer Irvin Kommenda
found that the chassis was hindering the vehicle's movement through water.
(27:35):
It just wasn't working. The Swimwagan would get a different
kind of vehicle body that actually look more like a
boat or honestly, I think if you were to pull
the top off a Schwemwagan, it would look like you
were left with a bathtub on wheels. The schvim Wagan
had a propeller that was on the back of the
(27:56):
vehicle as well. It was actually on a hinge, so
you can have it flipped up when it was just
in regular land use mode, and then when you went
into the water, you could flip down the propeller and
it would engage in an extension to the vehicle's drive train,
and the drive train would provide the rotational power to
the propeller. It could only go forward. You could not
(28:17):
move the propeller in reverse. And that is why Germany
issued oars to Schwimwagan drivers or pilots or captains or
whatever they were called. Anyway, they got oars as well
in case they ever had to go backwards. In y one,
Ferdinand Porsche's son in law, Anton pH became the manager
(28:39):
of the Volkswagen factory, and he had been a member
of the Nazi Party since nineteen thirty three. He would
actually end up being inducted into the s S before
the end of World War Two. He was in charge
of the Volkswagen Facility uh And and most of the
operations that saw the company make use of forced labor
(29:00):
and the construction of concentration camps. He was also the
head of a group of reserve soldiers who worked for Volkswagen,
and when Allied forces made their way into Germany towards
the end of World War Two, he would command the
soldiers and he also ultimately fled to his father in
law's estate, Ferdinand Porsche's estate in Austria UH. In the process,
(29:22):
he also made sure to transfer about one point four
million dollars worth of reich Mark from the company Coffers
to his own personal accounts. At the end of World
War Two, both Fernand Porsche and his son Faery Porsche
Uh that's you know, the other Ferdinand Porsche, as well
(29:43):
as Anton Pish were arrested and held by French authorities.
Fairy was released after six months, so Porsche the younger
was let out after half a year. But Porsche the
elder and Anton were a different story. They were in
prison for about two years but were ultimately set free.
As well. As for the manufacturing facility, much of it
(30:07):
was destroyed during World War Two. The fact that it
was a manufacturing center that played an important role in
producing material for German forces meant it was also a
prime bombing target for the Allies. After the war, the
British took control of the facility and they had the
opportunity to essentially liquidate everything, sell off everything, but instead
(30:32):
they decided to reconstruct the facility. They decided that the
vehicles themselves had value. A British Army officer named Major
Ivan Hurst was in charge of this operation. He was
the one who was convinced that the Volkswagen Type one
or Beatle had real value. First, however, he had a
(30:54):
small matter of disarming an unexploded bomb that had broke
and through the roof of the manufacturing plant and was
stuck between production equipment, So that was scary. The facility
would get a new name, and by that I mean
it was actually an old name. It became known as
Volksburg or Wolfsburg, after the nearby medieval castle. Hurst lobbied
(31:19):
for the British government to order twenty thousand of the
Volkswagen Type one two uh end up using them in
various official capacities, and the government ultimately agreed. By the
end of nineteen forty five, the factory had made around
seventeen hundred of the cars and it was starting to
ramp up production slowly. By nine the plant was finally
(31:43):
mass producing the vehicle for which it had been intended,
the Volkswagen Beetle or Type one. The British would hand
over control of the company to the government of West
Germany in nineteen forty nine. For the younger folks out
there in the audience, Germany at one point was split
it into two countries. For many decades you had East Germany,
(32:04):
which was a communist country and West Germany, which wasn't.
And the company would pay a licensing fee to the
Porsche Company for the rights to produce the Type one
or Beetle. The two companies, Volkswagen and Porsche would be
linked together through a relationship that's frankly so legally complicated.
I really can't get a grip on it, but they
(32:26):
would remain linked for up to today. So let's talk
about the Volkswagen Beetle a little bit. So the car
would become a true staple in Germany. In fact, by
nine more than half of all the passenger cars produced
in Germany were Volkswagen Beetles. The cars were truly iconic.
(32:48):
There was even a series of Disney films in which
a Volkswagen Beetle was the title character that would be
Herbie the love Bug, and the word bug was often
used as a nickname for the VW Beetle as well. Now,
the Beetle has a pretty distinctive curvy, almost bulbous shape,
but not that distinctive. What I mean by that is
(33:09):
that before the VW Beetle, there was actually a car
called the Tatra V five seventy. It was produced by
a check automaker named Hans Ledvinka, and the VW Beetle
didn't just look a little like the older Tatra V
five seventy. It looked a lot like it, and it
also featured some of the same engineering innovations. Like the Tatra.
(33:32):
The Beetle had a rear mounted and air cooled engine,
and Porsche himself essentially admitted to lifting some design ideas
from the Tatra vehicle. Before World War two broke out,
Tatra was bringing a lawsuit against Porsche because of this,
but then Germany invaded Czechoslovakia or what was then Czechoslovakia,
(33:54):
and that brought all the lawsuits to an end. Once
World War two was over, the matter was revisited it
and ultimately Volkswagen would pay a few million Deutsche marks
to Tatra income compensation for the use of intellectual property.
Let's say the financial setback is part of the reason
that Volkswagen kept producing the Beetle for as long as
(34:15):
it did. It remained on the market and in the
production line for so long because the company literally couldn't
afford to design a lot of new vehicles, and so
the Beetle would remain in production longer than you typically
would see a car be in production. And when we
come back, I'll talk more about the Beetle and it's
design features, but first let's take another quick break. Okay,
(34:45):
So the engine in a Volkswagen Beetle, the Volkswagen Type one,
is a type called a flat four air cooled engine.
So what the heck does that mean? Well, let's start
with the flat four. Now, that essentially refers to the
arrangement of the cylinders for this internal combustion engine. The
(35:06):
cylinders are where a mixture of fuel and air get
compressed before a spark plug ignites that mixture and that
creates the explosion that forces the piston that's that's compressing
this gas back out to the far end of its stroke.
This motion, in turn, provides the force that turns a crankshaft.
(35:28):
Now I've covered the basics of car engines before, so
I'm not going to go into much further detail here.
But the cylinders are where explosive force gets harnessed into
doing useful work of making a vehicle go. In a
typical engine, like an inline engine, the cylinders are arranged
so that if you were looking at the engine as
it was mounted in the car, everything is vertical. The
(35:49):
cylinders are up and down. The pistons move up and
down according to your frame of reference. So again that's
called an inline or straight internal combustion engine with the
four or however many cylinders in line with one another.
But the Volkswagen Beetles engine is a flat four. Now
that means the cylinders are in a horizontal position. You
(36:11):
have two on either side of the center of the engine,
so you have two cylinders that are essentially pointing to
the left and two that are pointing to the right,
and the pistons in the cylinders opposite each other move
in sync at least with the Volkswagen's engine. So the
piston in the cylinders closest to the front of the engine,
(36:32):
like if you were looking at the engine from the front,
the two cylinders on the cylinder on the left and
right that are closest to you, those pistons would be
moving in and out in sync with one another. So
not alternating, they would be doing it together. They'd both
be coming in and both be moving out at the
same time through each cycle. The two cylinders behind that,
(36:53):
the ones that are towards the back of the engine
from your frame of reference, would also be moving in
sync with each other. Now, the front cylinders and the
back cylinders would alternate, so the left and right would
be going in while the left and right in the
back would be going out. Uh, that's the way they
(37:14):
would alternate from your perspective. But otherwise you I hope
you can kind of visualize what I'm saying. And the
whole point of this is that the motion of the
cylinders or the motion of the pistons really are what
transfer energy to the crank shaft and power the drive train. Now,
as for the air cooled part of this air cooled
you know, four flat engine, Well, cooling an engine is
(37:37):
really important because, as you might imagine, if you have
a machine that relies upon harnessing explosions, that machine can
get pretty hot, and as things heat up, they can
expand or even fail Outright, So stuff gets hot beyond
whatever the operational tolerances, and then you've got a mechanical
(37:58):
failure just waiting to happen. So you have to have
some way to pull that heat away from the engine
and to keep the engine at operational levels. There are
a couple of different ways to do this, and air
cooled is probably the most basic method of doing it. Typically,
the engine casing has some fins that emerge from it.
(38:18):
These fins create a lot of surface area, so heat
moves from the engine out towards the fins, and then
air passes over those fins, and as the air passes
over it starts to take away some of that heat,
allowing the heat to dissipate. Most of your heat is
actually lost through exhaust, not through the fins, but the
fins do provide additional means to dissipate heat from the engine. Now,
(38:42):
this works pretty well for smaller engines uh and it
can even work in larger engines if those are vehicles
that are being operated in cold climates. So let's say
that you add a really big snowplow, Well, you might
have an engine that's air cooled, because presumably you're only
operating the snow plow when it's cold, when it's snowed.
(39:03):
Lots of motorcycles used this type of engine cooling method,
though more and more are moving more towards you know,
liquid cooling mechanisms as a port posed to air cooling anyway.
The engine for the Type one Volkswagens, the original version,
was an eleven hundred c C engine. Now c C
stands for cubic centimeter and it describes the volume or
(39:26):
capacity of an engine. It's also sometimes called engine displacement
because it specifically is referring to the volume of space
that the pistons within the cylinders are displacing, and you
measure it by going from the top dead center as
in the furthest out a piston gets from the interior
(39:47):
of its cylinder to the bottom dead center, the full
extent of the piston extending down into the cylinder, and
that tells you the volume of your engine. And you
also have to do that with all the cylinders, like
you have to you have to add up all the
cylinders together to get the full volume. So that would
(40:10):
mean that the Volkswagen Type one that with the original
engine would have cylinders that each had displacement of two
hundred seventy five cubic centimeters because it had four cylinders
and four times to seventy five eleven hundred. Now, we
in the United States often refer to engine displacement in
leaders as opposed to cubic centimeters. So how does that translate. Well, roughly,
(40:33):
you can say that a one thousand cc engine is
one leader, So in this case, you could say an
eleven hundred cc engine would be equivalent to a one
point one leader engine. Engine capacity plays a role in
an engine's outputs, such as torque, power, and mileage. Generally speaking,
the power output of an engine is directly proportional to
(40:56):
its engine capacity or volume. But the bigger volume, the
more fuel the engine will burn through in a given
amount of time. So mileage tends to suffer as engine
volume increases. It's a bit of a balance, and there
are different technologies that help mitigate that in different ways.
But again that's another episode. So the Volkswagen Beetles engine,
(41:17):
the original version wasn't much of a powerhouse, but the
car itself was small and UH didn't need a whole
lot of power to to have it put around. The
original version was a twenty five horsepower engine, and horse
power is a measurement of the rate at which work
is done. UH it compares the amount of work and
engine is capable of doing against the amount of work
(41:40):
a typical draft horse could do. Have to do a
full episode to explain stuff like horsepower at some point too,
I suppose. But the engine's output could push the original
Beetle up to a top speed of around a hundred
kilometers per hour, which was one of Hitler's goals, and
that's about sixty two miles per hour. It would take
about half a minute to accelerate from a full stop
(42:03):
to top speed, so it wasn't exactly a speed demon now.
As I've mentioned earlier, the Beatles engine mounting was in
the rear of the vehicle, not the front where you
would find it in most cars. The Beetle was a
rear wheel drive vehicle as well, so that means the
back two wheels were the ones getting power. They're actually
getting rotational force. The engine provided the force needed to
(42:27):
turn those back wheels of the car, and the front
of the car, where the engine would be in most vehicles,
was used to store luggage. That was what would normally
be the trunk or boot of a standard car. There
was also a small area for luggage and other stuff
behind the back seat in the in the car, not
a whole lot of space, but a little bit. The
(42:47):
original Beetle was also called the split screen Beetle because
the rear windshield of these original Beetles that rolled off
the assembly line back in nineteen were actually two panel
that were split by the windshield frame itself, so you
had a little, you know, strip of metal right down
the middle of the windshield holding these two frames in place.
(43:09):
After nineteen fifty three, the company ditched the split backwind
shield design, and the cars from nineteen fifty three to
nineteen fifty six had an oval shaped wind shield, and
then the ones after nineteen fifty six went to a
larger rectangular windshield for the back. That became the standard
from that point moving forward. There were several variations of
(43:32):
the Volkswagen Type one. One of them didn't see much
widespread use, but it was a necessity during wartime, and
that was a wood burning Volkswagen. It's a type of
producer gas car. This type of car would use wood
and would heat the wood up to very high temperatures
like around fourteen hundred degrees celsius or two thousand, five
(43:55):
hundred fifty degrees fahrenheit. And at that temperature, the wood
decomposes to a combustible gas. That combustible gas would be
fed into the car's cylinders much like a conventional petrol
type of fuel would be, and it would then ignite
and create the explosions, and so you would still have
an internal combustion engine, but instead of running on gasoline
(44:17):
or petrol, you were using you know, gasified wood. Cars
with these engines had large gasification units attached them, typically
to the back of the vehicle, sometimes even trailing behind
in its own little trailer, and there was usually a
pipe that was running from the gasification unit over the
(44:38):
length of the vehicle, feeding into the car's engine. Uh.
They look a little odd, to say the least. After
the war, when gasoline became available, these things pretty much vanished. Now,
in the case of the Volkswagen Beetle, they didn't have
to have a pipe run the entire length of the
car because again the engine was in the back. So
(45:00):
mounting a gasification chamber on the back of the vehicle
just meant that you could supply the gas directly to
the engine without having to run a pipe through the
length of the vehicle. More conventional variations on the Beetle
included the Beatle Cabriolet, which was a convertible. Beetle had
a soft top uh and numerous other tweaks to the design.
(45:23):
It wasn't just that it had a soft top as
opposed to the hard top Beatles. There were other differences
as well. But before introducing the Beetle to the American market,
Volkswagen began to install heftier engines that provided a bit
more oomph. So Beatles would come in engine sizes that
range from the original eleven hundred ccs up to sixteen
hundred ccs also known as one point six Leaders. In
(45:47):
nineteen fifty eight, an American advertising agency called Doyle dan
burn Bach launched an ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle,
and it was called Think Small and The ad featured
a mostly blank page with a small photograph of a
VW Beetle in it. At the base of the page
was a short rundown of the car's features, worded in
(46:08):
a way that was a bit self deprecating and humorous.
It became one of the most successful ad campaigns of
the twentieth century. A decade later, Disnety release that movie
I was talking about earlier Herbie the love Bug. In
that comedy, a race car driver discovers that a nineteen
sixty three Volkswagen Beetle has its own personality and a
mind of its own. And it's a cute little movie,
(46:31):
and it spawned several sequels, and it also helped boost
the Beatles profile. That year marked when the U S
would become the home fortent of the Volkswagen Beetles produced
by the company. In ninety two, the Beatle overtook the
venerable Model t Ford to become the best selling car
of all time. Uh it no longer holds that title
(46:54):
as I understand it, but it did at one point.
The Volkswagen Beetle remained in production until nine seventy nine
in Germany, which is pretty darn phenomenal. It would be
continued to be produced in Mexico. Part of the reason
why the Beetle was discontinued was that over time, emissions
standards were getting more restrictive in various parts of the world,
(47:18):
and the Beatle performance just didn't meet up to those standards.
But in Mexico those restrictions did not uh evolve quite
as quickly, and so for a much longer time it
was being produced out of Mexico. So for a while,
if you were determined to get a Volkswagen Beetle, you
could still get one, even after nineteen seventy nine. You
(47:40):
could get a new one. Even after nineteen seventy nine,
it would just be one that was produced in Mexico
as opposed to in Germany. Anyway, there were changes over
the course of the entire run of the Volkswagen Beetle
from nine to nineteen seventy nine, but overall it stayed
pretty consistent. Now and then next episode, we're going to
(48:01):
talk about some of the other vehicles that Volkswagen produced
throughout its history, and we'll also look at the New Beatle,
which is no longer new, but it was so called
the New Beatle when when debuted, as well as the
VW Beetle final Edition. So that's a bit of foreshadowing,
and also the controversy surrounding that in missions scandal that
(48:22):
I mentioned at the top of this episode, not to
mention other elements that play into Volkswagen's history. Not all
of it is happy and not all of it is positive,
but it's all fascinating stuff. So that wraps up this
first episode about Volkswagen. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
(48:42):
If you have any suggestions or requests or comments or anything,
you can reach out to me on social media. The
handle for our podcast on both Twitter and Facebook is
text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I heart
(49:03):
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.