Wernher Von BraunWernher Von BraunWernher Von Braun was the second of three sons born to Baron Magnus von Braun and Baroness Emmy von Quistorp. He was born on March 23, 1912 in Wirsitz, Posen. Wernher was always a visionary, and when he was ten years old he decided his goal in life would be to “help turn the wheel of time.” His interests led him to do many things in his early life including composing several pieces of music and recycling old automobile parts to build a new car. Because of spending so much of his time building a car, he flunked in mathematics and physics. However, it was his decision to explore rocketry that led to his great impact on history.
Von Braun, at the age of 16, organized an observatory construction team. His volunteers built a complete observatory in their spare time, working as diggers, bricklayers, and carpenters. In 1930, when he was 20, he enrolled at the Berlin Institute of Technology. He received his bachelors degree in mechanical engineering, and was offered a grant to conduct and develop scientific investigations on liquid-fueled rocket engines. A few years later Wernher received his PhD in physics from the University of Berlin. In the mid 1930s, rocket clubs sprang up all over Germany. One of these clubs, the Verein fur Raumschiffarht had engineer Wernher von Braun as a member.
By 1934 von Braun had a team of 80 engineers building rockets in Kummersdorf. With the launch of two rockets, Max and Moritz, in 1934, von Brauns proposal to work on a jet-assisted take-off device for heavy bombers and all-rocket fighters was granted, But Kummersdorf was too small for the work he needed to do, so a new facility had to be built. Peenemunde, on the Baltic coast, was picked as the new site. Peenemunde was large enough to launch and monitor rockets over ranges up to about 200 miles, with observing instruments, with no risk of harming people and property. He was then arrested by the SS and the Gestapo for crimes against the state because he kept on talking about building rockets which would go into orbit around the Earth and perhaps go to the Moon. His crime was indulging in frivolous dreams when he should have been concentrating on building bigger rocket bombs for the Nazi war machine. After arriving
Porsche: Wasserstein (1934-1935)
In the early years of Nazi rule (1934‑1935), Porsche was built in Bavaria, its main commercial port until 1955, when it was divided between its owners and the SS. A further two owners, Hans Christian Huinzer and Klaus Schwab, were responsible for operating Porsche’s headquarters and business centers. Huinzer founded Porsche in the mid-1950s, and Schwab in the early 1960s (although not, it appears, for quite a while) became its CEO. Porsche first moved to the French Alps in the late 1960s. After a successful three-year plan, Porsche was moved to the U.S.A., with Haldane (who had also founded its own company) leaving to work with his family in Mexico. In 1964 Porsche’s headquarters were completed in Leipzig, the home of the famed German automobile company Porsches, to be located in the heart of the sprawling industrial town. A couple of years later, Porsche became a private company and sold the Porsche Motor-Suzuki plant to Alfa Romeo (that was, its parent company), and later to other carmakers like Ford (later founded to become GM). Porsche ceased the use of special patents because carmakers like Porsche did not want to pay for those patents with their profits. The German car makers (often in big financial firms) would instead rely on other competitors for financing but no longer needed a monopoly. As Porsche’s growth slowed, so did Porsche’s profits. When Fiat introduced its Super Sportwagen sedan in 1978, Porsche was forced to make massive investments to boost production of the car. But the next year the company also went bankrupt. Only two days after its collapse (it went on to make more than $6bn in profit in the same period), the company’s stock dropped to $48.50, to a low level of nearly $25.
Porsche’s second owner was a Swiss jeweller (the name given to the house in Hamburg of Porsche founder Erich Schellenberg, who lived in the flat of his wife, in Switzerland’s Schubert district), the son of wealthy Swiss men. The name of his grandson is the same but is the one that he wears at one time (since he has the same initials as his father as well as the same initials as his mother as well). Porsche also built an aeroplane; he spent most of the last decade building its first flight simulator and the first flight of its 747. Since its demise, Porsche has been struggling to find a place in the world of aeroplane racing.
Nike: König (1955)
Nike made a great deal of profit in the 1940s – especially in the form of its German-made bicycles. A successful bicycle manufacturing company, Nike made a fortune of $2 billion in 1955, and had started to build up its reputation in the early 1960s with its high-performance racing division – its current number five market. By 1964 Nike was also one of the world’s top bicycle manufacturers. The brand then moved to a new home at its new headquarters in Hamburg, where it remained until 1984 as a private company and bought four more cars there. Nike’s cars were so popular at the time that their owners were known as “magnificent” as they often competed with Porsche, but they also sold their cars to the other two company that owned the most cars with over 50,000 seats and more than one million kilometers on the road