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THE SCHÉHÉRAZADE OF DIAGHILEV (AND BAKST)
“IMPRESARIO” CONJURES up the image of a larger-than-life individual, not just an artistic director of something or other, but one whose influence extends considerably further. Serge Diaghilev, founder...
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BENZ MOTORWAGEN ADVENTURES
KARL BENZ built perhaps 25 automobiles between the granting of his 1886 patent and 1893, and Patent-Motorwagen No. 3 had a particularly adventurous life: In 1888, Karl’s wife Bertha and her kids took...
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EDSON GALLAUDET’S GLORIOUS FLYING MACHINES
THE NAME Edson Fesseden Gallaudet may not come to mind with the likes of the Wright Brothers or Glenn Curtiss, but it deserves a lot more than a footnote. His 1889 Hydro-Bike had an innovation given...
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ENGINEERING THE SEAHORSE
THERE’S A joke about God’s engineering background: He’s an Electrical Engineer because of the brain’s neurological wonders, a Mechanical Engineer because of the skeleton’s elegant efficiency, a Chem...
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IMPRESSIONISM, SACRÉ BLEU AND CADMIUM-SULFIDE YELLOW
THIS IS triply a celebration of an era, a book review and a scientific tidbit. The era is the Belle Epoque, 1871 to the outbreak of World War I, when artists, many of them Paris-based, saw light and...
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MICHAEL MAY’S MARVELOUS IDEA
YOU MIGHT think that somewhere in Zuffenhausen, Porsche’s legendary home outside Stuttgart, Germany, there’d be a statue honoring Michael May. Alas, to the best of my research, there is not. Nor is...
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ERCOLE BORATTO: RACE DRIVER, MUSSOLINI’S CHAUFFEUR—AND HIS LEPORELLO
IN MOZART’S Don Giovanni, Leporello does many things for his boss, one of them maintaining a catalog of the lecherous Giovanni’s conquests. (One line of the aria: Ma in Espana, mille e tre, But in...
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MAZDA LAUNDRY GOES “HMMMMMM”
BACK IN the 1970s, Mazda made the excellent point that conventional engines went “boing boing boing,” whereas its rotary powerplant went “hmmmmmm.” Today, high-efficiency laundry facilities may go...
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ON EARLY SLEUTHING
MANY CONSIDER Sherlock Holmes the world’s first detective. With more than a little hubris, a while back I proposed otherwise in noting that Kumedera Danjō, the hero in the Kabuki play Kenuki, 1742,...
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WHA’ CHA’ M’ CALL IT
LIKE DOOHICKEY and gizmo, wha’ cha’ m’ call it (also rendered whatchamacallit) is a placeholder, a word referring to things the names of which are irrelevant, unknown or temporarily forgotten. However,...
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