The Dark Origins of Volkswagen

Published Jan 13, 2020, 11:00 AM

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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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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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