Bug

Bug (pronounced buhg)

(1) Any insect of the order Hemiptera, especially any of the suborder Heteroptera (a hemipteran or hemipteron; a hemipterous insect), having piercing and sucking mouthparts specialized as a beak (rostrum) and known loosely as the “true bug”.

(2) Any of various species of marine or freshwater crustaceans.

(3) In casual use, any insect or insect-like invertebrate (ie used often of spiders and such because of their supposed “bug-like” quality).

(4) In casual use, any micro-organism causing disease, applied especially to especially a virus or bacterium.

(5) An instance of a disease caused by such a micro-organism; a class of such conditions.

(6) In casual (and sometimes structured) use, a defect or imperfection, most associated with computers but applied also to many mechanical devices or processes.

(7) A craze or obsession (usually widespread or of long-standing).

(8) In slang, a person who has a great enthusiasm for such a craze or obsession (often as “one bitten by the bug”).

(9) In casual (and sometimes structured) use, a hidden microphone, camera or other electronic eavesdropping device (a clipping of bugging device) and used analogously of the small and effectively invisible (often a single-pixel image) image on a web page, installed usually for the purpose of tracking users.

(10) Any of various small mechanical or electrical gadgets, as one to influence a gambling device, give warning of an intruder, or indicate location.

(11) A mark, as an asterisk, that indicates a particular item, level, etc.

(12) In US horse racing, the five pound (2¼ kg) weight allowance able to be claimed by an apprentice jockey and by extension (1) the asterisk used to denote an apprentice jockey's weight allowance & (2) in slang, US, a young apprentice jockey (sometimes as “bug boy” (apparently used thus also of young female jockeys, “bug girl” seemingly beyond the pale.)).

(13) A telegraph key that automatically transmits a series of dots when moved to one side and one dash when moved to the other.

(14) In the slang of poker, a joker which may be used only as an ace or as a wild card to fill a straight or a flush.

(15) In commercial printing, as “union bug”, a small label printed on certain matter to indicate it was produced by a unionized shop.

(16) In fishing, a any of various plugs resembling an insect.

(17) In slang, a clipping of bedbug (mostly UK).

(18) A bogy; hobgoblin (extinct).

(19) In slang, as “bug-eyed”, protruding eyes (the medical condition exophthalmos).

(20) A slang term for the Volkswagen Beetle (Type 1; 1938-2003 & the two retro takes; 1997-2011 & 2011-2019).

(21) In broadcasting, a small (often transparent or translucent) image placed in a corner of a television program identifying the broadcasting network or channel.

(22) In aviation, a manually positioned marker in flight instruments.

(23) In gay (male) slang in the 1980s & 1990s as “the bug”, HIV/AIDS.

(24) In the slang of paleontology, a trilobite.

(25) In gambling slang, a small piece of metal used in a slot machine to block certain winning combinations.

(26) In gambling slang, a metal clip attached to the underside of a table, etc and used to hold hidden cards (a type of cheating).

(27) As the Bug (or Western Bug), a river in Eastern Europe flows through Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine with a total length of 481 miles (774 km).  The Southern Bug (530 miles (850 km)) in south west Ukraine flows into the Dnieper estuary and is some 530 miles (850 km) long.

(28) A past tense and past participle of big (obsolete).

(29) As ISO (international standard) 639-2 & ISO 639-3, the language codes for Buginese.

(30) To install a secret listening device in a room, building etc or on a telephone or other communications device.

(31) To badger, harass, bother, annoy or pester someone.

1615–1625: The original use was to describe insects, apparently as a variant of the earlier bugge (beetle), thought to be an alteration of the Middle English budde, from the Old English -budda (beetle) but etymologists are divided on whether the phrase “bug off” (please leave) is related to the undesired presence of insects or was of a distinct origin.  Bug, bugging & debug are nouns & verbs, bugged is a verb & adjective and buggy is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is bugs.  Although “unbug” makes structural sense (ie remove a bug, as opposed to the sense of “debug”), it doesn’t exist whereas forms such as the adjectives unbugged (not bugged) and unbuggable (not able to be bugged) are regarded as standard.

Nerd humor.

The array of compound forms meaning “someone obsessed with an idea, hobby etc) produced things like “shutterbug” (amateur photographer) & firebug (arsonist) seems first to have emerged in the mid nineteenth century.  The development of this into “a craze or obsession” is thought rapidly to have accelerated in the years just before World War I (1914-1918), again based on the notion of “bitten by the bug” or “caught the bug”, thus the idea of being infected with an unusual enthusiasm for something.  The use to mean a demon, evil spirit, spectre or hobgoblin was first recorded in the mid-fourteenth century and was a clipping of the Middle English bugge (scarecrow, demon, hobgoblin) or uncertain origin although it may have come from the Middle Welsh bwg (ghost; goblin (and linked to the Welsh bwgwl (threat (and earlier “fear”) and the Middle Irish bocanách (supernatural being).  There’s also speculation it may have come from the scary tales told to children which included the idea of a bugge (beetle) at a gigantic scale.  That would have been a fearsome sight and the idea remains fruitful to this day for artists and film-makers needing something frightening in the horror or SF (science fiction) genre.  The use in this sense is long obsolete although the related forms bugbear and bugaboo survive.  Dating from the 1570s, a bugbear was in folklore a kind of “large goblin”, used to inspire fear in children (both as a literary device & for purposes of parental control) and for adults it soon came to mean “a source of dread, resentment or irritation; in modern use it's an “ongoing problem”, a recurring obstacle or adversity or one’s pet peeve.  The obsolete form bugg dates from circa 1620s and was a reference to the troublesome bedbug, the construct a conflation of the middle English bugge (scarecrow, hobgoblin) and the Middle English budde (beetle).  The colloquial sense of “a microbe or germ” dates from 1919, the emergence linked to the misleadingly-named “Spanish flu” pandemic.

Bugs: A ground beetle (left), a first generation der Käfer (the Volkswagen Beetle, 1938-2003) (centre) and an "New Beetle" (1997-2011).  Despite the appearance, the "New Beetle" was of front engine & FWD (front-wheel-drive) configuration, essentially a re-bodied Volkswagen Golf.  The new car was sold purely as a retro, the price paid for the style, certain packaging inefficiencies.  Few have ever questioned why the original VW Beetle picked up the nickname “bug”.

Nerd humor:  "That's not a bug; it's a feature."  As all programmers know, if the audience is "right", many a "bug" can (at least temporarily while rushing to do a "bug-fix") be "explained away" as "a feature"; the linguistically adventurous sometimes preferring "undocumented feature".

Like the rest of us, even scientists, entomologists and zoologists generally probably say “bug” in general conversation, whether about the insects or the viruses and such which cause disease but in writing academic papers they’ll take care to be more precise.  Because to most of us “bugs” can be any of the small, creepy pests which intrude on our lives (some of which are actually helpful in that quietly and unobtrusively they dispose of the really annoying bugs which bite us), the word is casually and interchangeably applied to bees, ants, bees, millipedes, beetles, spiders and anything else resembling an insect.  That use may be reinforced by the idea of the thing “bugging” us by their very presence.  To the professionals however, insects are those organisms in the classification Insecta, a very large class of animals, the members of which have a three-part body, six legs and (usually) two pairs of wings whereas a bug is a member of the order Hemiptera (which in the taxonomic system is within the Insecta class) and includes cicadas, aphids and stink bugs; to emphasize the point, scientists often speak of those in the order Hemiptera as “true bugs”.  The true bugs are those insects with mouthparts adapted for piercing and sucking, contained usually in a beak-shaped structure, a vision agonizingly familiar to anyone who has suffered the company of bedbugs.  That’s why lice are bugs and cockroaches are not but the latter will continue to be called bugs, often with some preceding expletive.

Bug #1, 9 September, 1947: The engineer's note (with physical evidence) of electronic computing's "first bug".

In computing, where the term “bug” came to be used to describe “glitches, crashes” and such, it has evolved to apply almost exclusively to software issues and even if events are caused by hardware flaws, unless it’s something obvious (small explosions, flame & smoke etc) most users probably assume a fault in some software layer.  The very first documented bug however was an interaction recorded on 9 September, 1947 between the natural world and hardware, an engineer’s examination of an early (large) computer revealing an insect had sacrificially landed on one of the circuits, shorting it out and shutting-down the machine.  As proof, the unfortunate moth was taped to the report.  On a larger scale (zoologically rather than the hardware), the problem of small rodents such as mice entering the internals of printers, there to die from various causes (impact injuries, starvation, heat etc) remains not uncommon, resulting sometimes in mechanical damage, sometimes just the implications of decaying flesh.

Revelle's Bug Bomb, 1970.

The idea of a bug as a “defect, flaw, fault or glitch” in a mechanical or electrical device was first recorded in the late 1800s as engineer’s slang, the assumption being they wished to convey the idea of “a small fault” (and thus easily fixed, as opposed to some fundamental mistake which would necessitate a re-design).  Some sources suggest the origin lies with Thomas Edison (1847-1931) who is reported as describing the consequences of an insect “getting into the works”.  Programmers append an array of adjectives to "bug" (major, minor, serious, critical & non-critical etc) although between themselves (and certainly when disparaging of the code of others) the most commonly heard phrases probably are “stupid bug” or “fuckin' bug”.  The “debugging” (also as de-bugging) process is something with a wide definition but in general it refers to any action or set of actions taken to remove errors.  The name of the debug.exe (originally debug.com) program included with a number of (almost all 16 & 32-bit) operating systems was a little misleading because in addition to fixing things, it could be used for other purposes and is fondly remembered by those who wrote Q&D (quick & dirty) work-arounds which, written in assembler (which “hit the hardware” directly), ran very fast.  The verb debug was first used in 1945 in the sense of “remove the faults from a machine” and by 1964 it appeared in field service manuals documenting the steps to be taken to “remove a concealed microphone”.  Although the origin of the use of “bug” in computing (probably the now most commonly used context) can be traced to 1947, the term wasn’t widely used beyond universities, industry and government sites before the 1960s when the public first began to interact at scale with the implications (including the bugs) of those institutions using computerized processes.  Software (or any machinery) badly afflicted by bugs can be called “buggy”, a re-purposing of the use of an adjective dating from 1714 meaning “a place infested with bugs”.

Some bugs gained notoriety.  In the late 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon for the press to refer to the potential problems of computer code using an alpha-numeric syntax, “Y2K bug” an indication of how wide was the vista of the common understanding of "bug" and one quite reasonable because that was how the consequences would be understood.  A massive testing & rectification effort was undertaken by industry (and corporations, induced by legislation and the fear of litigation) and with the coming of 1 January 2000 almost nothing strange happened and that may also have been the case had nothing been done but, on the basis of the precautionary principle, it was the right approach.  Of course switching protocols to use four-numeral years did nothing about the Y10K bug but a (possible) problem 8000 years hence was of little interest to politicians or corporate boards.  Actually, Ynnn~K bugs will re-occur (theoretically with decreasing frequency) whenever a digit needs to be added.  The obvious solution is trailing zeros although if one thinks in terms of infinity, it may be that, in the narrow technical sense, such a solution would just create an additional problem although perhaps one of no practical significance.  Because of the way programmers exploit the way computers work, there have since the 1950s been other date (“time” to a computer) related “bugs” and management of these and the minor problems caused has been handled well.  Within the industry the feeling is things like the “Y2038 problem” will, for most of the planet, be similarly uneventful.

The DOSShell, introduced with PC-DOS 4.0; this was as graphical as DOS got.  The text-based DOSShell was bug-free and a reasonable advance over what came before but the power users had already adopted Executive Systems' XTree as their preferred file handler.

Bugs can also become quirky industry footnotes.  As late as 1987, IBM had intended to release the update of PC-DOS 3.3 as version 3.4, reflecting the corporation’s roadmap of DOS as something of an evolutionary dead-end, doomed ultimately to end up in washing machine controllers and such while the consumer and corporate market would shift to OS/2, the new operating system which offered pre-emptive multi-tasking and access to bigger storage and memory addressing.  However, at that point, both DOS & OS/2 were being co-developed by IBM & Microsoft and agreement was reached to release a version 4 of DOS.  DOS 4 also included a way of accessing larger storage space (through a work-around with a program called share.exe) and more memory (in a way less elegant than the OS/2 approach but it did work, albeit more slowly), both things of great interest to Microsoft because they would increase the appeal of its upcoming Windows 3.0, a graphical shell which ran on top of DOS; unlike OS/2, Windows was exclusive to Microsoft and so was the revenue stream.  Unfortunately, it transpired the PC-DOS 4.0 memory tricks were “buggy” when used with some non-IBM hardware and the OS gained a bad reputation from which it would never recover.  By the time the code was fixed (an released as PC-DOS 4.01), Microsoft was ready to release its own version as MS-DOS 4.0 but, noting all the bad publicity, after some cosmetic revisions, the mainstream release was MS-DOS 4.01.  In the code of the earlier, bug-afflicted bits, there seems no substantive difference between MS-DOS 4.01 the few extant copies of MS-DOS 4.0.

Herbie, the love bug

Lindsay Lohan among the bugs and on the red carpet for the Los Angeles premiere of Herbie Fully Loaded (a 2005 remake of The Love Bug (1968)), El Capitan Theater, Hollywood, Los Angeles, 19 June 19, 2005.  The Beetle (right) was one of the many replica “Herbies” in attendance and, on the day, Ms Lohan (using the celebrity-endorsed black Sharpie) autographed the glove-box lid, removed for the purpose. 

In idiomatic and other uses, bug has a long history.  By the early twentieth century “bugs” meant “mad; crazy" and by then “bug juice” had been in use for some thirty years, meaning both “propensity of the use of alcoholic drink to induce bad behaviour” and “bad whiskey” (in the sense of a product being of such dubious quality it was effectively a poison).  A slang dictionary from 1811 listed “bug-hunter” as “an upholsterer”, an allusion to the fondness bugs and other small creatures show for sheltering in the dark, concealed parts of furniture.  As early as the 1560s, a “bug-word” was a word or phrase which “irritated or vexed”.  The idea of “bug-eyed” was in use by the early 1870s and that’s thought either to be a humorous mispronunciation of bulge or (as is thought more likely) an allusion to the prominent, protruding eyes of creatures like frogs, the idea being they sat on the body like “a pair of bugs”.  The look became so common in the movies featuring aliens from space that by the early 1950s the acronym BEM (bug-eyed monster) had become part of industry slang.  The correct term for the medical condition of "bulging eyes" is exophthalmos.

Lindsay Lohan in promotional poster for Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005).

To “bug someone” in the sense of “to annoy or irritate” seems not to have been recorded until 1949 and while some suggest the origin of that was in swing music slang, it remains obscure.  The now rare use of “bug off” to mean “to scram, to skedaddle” is documented since 1956 and is of uncertain origin but may be linked to the Korean War (1950-1953) era US Army slang meaning “stage a precipitous retreat”, first used during a military reversal.  The ultimate source was likely the UK, Australian & New Zealand slang “bugger off” (please leave).  The “doodle-bug” was first described in 1865 and was Southern US dialect for a type of beetle.  In 1944, the popular slang for the German Vergeltungswaffen eins (the V-1 (reprisal weapon 1) which was the first cruise missile) was “flying bomb” or “buzz bomb”) but the RAF (Royal Air Force) pilots preferred “doodlebug”.

The ultimate door-stop for aircraft hangers: Bond Bug 700.

The popularity of three wheeler cars in the UK during the post-war years was a product of cost breakdown.  They were taxed at a much lower rate than conventional four-wheel vehicles, were small and thus economical and could be operated by anyone with only a motorcycle licence.  Most were genuine (if not generous) four-seaters and thus an attractive alternative for families and, being purely utilitarian, there were few attempts to introduce elements of style.  The Bond Bug (1970-1974) was an exception in that it was designed to appeal to the youth market with a sporty-looking two-seater using the then popular “wedge-styling” and in its most powerful form it could touch 80 mph (130 km/h), faster than any other three wheeler available.  The bug was designed by Vienna-born British designer Tom Karen (1926–2022) who intended it as a “Ferrari for 16-year-olds” which may hint he knew more about cars than young males but in the 1970s such comparisons often were made, a tester in one magazine describing the diminutive Fiat 127 (1971-1983) as “the 0.9 litre Ferrari” which was journalistic licence writ large but people knew what he meant.

An infestation of Bugs.  Shades of orange and brown seemed to stalk the 1970s.

However, the UK in 1973 introduced VAT (value-added tax, a consumption tax) and this removed many of the financial advantages three-wheelers offered (it also doomed much of the “kit-car” business in which customers could buy the parts and assemble them with their own labor).  In an era of rising prosperity, the appeal of the compromise waned and coupled with some problems in the early productions runs, in 1974, after some 2¼ thousand Bugs had been built, the zany little machine was dropped; not even the oil crisis of the time (which had doomed a good number of bigger, thirstier cars) and the nasty recession which followed could save it.  Even in its best years it was never all that successful, essentially because it was really a novelty and there were “real” cars available for less money.  Still, the survivors have a following in their niche at the lower end of the collector market and it's a machine truly like no other.

Bugging devices

The business of spying is said to be the “second oldest profession” and even if not literally true, few doubt the synergistic callings of espionage and war are among man’s earliest and most enduring endeavors.  Although the use of “bug” to mean “equip with a concealed microphone” seems not to have been in use until 1946, bugging devices probably go back thousands of years (in a low-tech sort of way) and those known to have been used in Tudor-era England (1485-1603) are representative of the way available stuff was adapted, the most popular being tubular structures which, if pressed against a thin wall (or preferably a door’s keyhole) enabled one to listen to what was being discussed in a closed room.  Bugging began to assume its modern form when messages began to be transmitted over copper wires which could stretch for thousands of miles and the early term for a “phone bug” was “phone tap”, based upon the idea of “tapping into” the line as one might a water pipe.  Bugs (the name picked-up because many of the early devices were small, black and “bug-like”), whether as concealed microphones or phone taps, swiftly became part of the espionage inventory in diplomacy, commerce and crime and as technology evolved, so did the bugging techniques.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr (1902–1985), US Ambassador to the UN (United Nations) at a May 1960 session of the Security Council, using the Great Seal bug to illustrate the extent of Soviet bugging.  The context was a tu quoque squabble between the Cold War protagonists, following Soviet revelations about the flight-paths of the American's U2 spy planes.  Lodge would be Richard Nixon’s (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974) running mate in that year's presidential election.     

A classic bug of High Cold War was the Great Seal bug, (known to the security services as the thing), a Soviet designed and built concealed listening device which was so effective because it used passive transmission protocols for its audio signal, thereby rendering it invisible to conventional “bug-detection” techniques.  The bug was concealed inside large, carved wooden rendition of the US Great Seal which, in 1945, the Kremlin presented as a “gift of friendship” to the US Ambassador to the USSR Averell Harriman (1891-1986); in a nice touch, it was a group of Russian school children who handed over the carving.  Sitting in the ambassador’s Moscow office for some seven years, it was a masterpiece of its time because (1) being activated only when exposed to a low-energy radio signal which Soviet spies would transmit from outside, when subjected to a US “bug detection” it would appear to be a piece of wood and (2) as it needed no form of battery or other power supply (and indeed, no maintenance at all), its lifespan was indefinite.  Had it not by chance been discovered by a communications officer at the nearby British embassy who happened to be tuned to the same frequency while the Soviets were sending their signal, it may well have remained in place for decades.  Essentially, the principles of the Great Seal bug were those used in modern radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems.

Beetle

Beetle (pronounced beet-l)

(1) Any of numerous insects of the order Coleoptera, having biting mouthparts and characterized by hard, horny forewings modified to form shell-like protective elytra forewings that cover and protect the membranous flight wings.

(2) Used loosely, any of various insects resembling true beetles.

(3) A game of chance in which players attempt to complete a drawing of a beetle, different dice rolls allowing them to add the various body parts.

(4) A heavy hammering or ramming instrument, usually of wood, used to drive wedges, force down paving stones, compress loose earth etc.

(5) A machine in which fabrics are subjected to a hammering process while passing over rollers, as in cotton mills; used to finish cloth and other fabrics, they’re known also as a “beetling machine”

(6) To use a beetle on; to drive, ram, beat or crush with a beetle; to finish cloth or other fabrics with a beetling machine.

(7) In slang, quickly to move; to scurry (mostly UK), used also in the form “beetle off”.

(8) Something projecting, jutting out or overhanging (used to describe geological formation and, in human physiology, often in the form beetle browed).

(9) By extension, literally or figuratively, to hang or tower over someone in a threatening or menacing manner.

(10) In slang, the original Volkswagen and the later retro-model, based on the resemblance (in silhouette) of the car to the insect; used with and without an initial capital; the alternative slang “bug” was also analogous with descriptions of the insects.

Pre 900: From the late Middle English bittil, bitil, betylle & bityl, from the Old English  bitula, bitela, bītel & bīetel (beetle (and apparently originally meaning “little biter; biting insect”)), from bēatan (to beat) (and related to bitela, bitel & betl, from bītan (to bite) & bitol (teeth)), from the Proto-West Germanic bitilō & bītil, from the Proto-Germanic bitilô & bītilaz (that which tends to bite, biter, beetle), the construct being bite +‎ -le.  Bite was from the Middle English biten, from the Old English bītan (bite), from the Proto-West Germanic bītan, from the Proto-Germanic bītaną (bite), from the primitive Indo-European bheyd- (split) and the -le suffix was from the Middle English -elen, -len & -lien, from the Old English -lian (the frequentative verbal suffix), from the Proto-Germanic -lōną (the frequentative verbal suffix) and was cognate with the West Frisian -elje, the Dutch -elen, the German -eln, the Danish -le, the Swedish -la and the Icelandic -la.  It was used as a frequentative suffix of verbs, indicating repetition or continuousness.  The forms in Old English were cognate with the Old High German bicco (beetle), the Danish bille (beetle), the Icelandic bitil & bitul (a bite, bit) and the Faroese bitil (small piece, bittock).

In architecture, what was historically was the "beetle brow" window is now usually called "the eyebrow".  A classic example of a beetle-brow was that of Rudolf Hess (1894–1987; Nazi deputy führer 1933-1941).  

Beetle in the sense of the tool used to work wood, stonework, fabric etc also dates from before 900 and was from the Middle English betel & bitille (mallet, hammer), from the Old English bītel, bētel & bȳtel which was cognate with the Middle Low German bētel (chisel), from bēatan & bētan (beat) and related to the Old Norse beytill (penis).  The adjectival sense applied originally to human physiology (as beetle-browed) and later extended to geological formations (as a back-formation of beetle-browed) and architecture where it survives as the “eyebrow” window constructions mounted in sloping roofs.  The mid-fourteenth century Middle English bitelbrouwed (grim-browed, sullen (literally “beetle-browed”)) is thought to have been an allusion to the many beetles with bushy antennae, the construct being the early thirteenth century bitel (in the sense of "sharp-edged, sharp" which was probably a compound from the Old English bitol (biting, sharp) + brow, which in Middle English meant "eyebrow" rather than "forehead."  Although the history of use in distant oral traditions is of course murky, it may be from there that the Shakespearean back-formation (from Hamlet (1602)) in the sense of "project, overhang" was coined, perhaps from bitelbrouwed.  As applied to geological formations, the meaning “dangerously to overhang cliffs etc” dates from circa 1600.   The alternative spellings bittle, betel & bittil are all long obsolete.  Beetle is a noun & verb & adjective, beetled is a verb, beetling is a verb & adjective and beetler is a noun; the noun plural is beetles.

Gazing back.

Even before he went mad (something of a calling among German philosophers) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) warned the impressionable: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” (Aphorism 146 in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886) by Friedrich Nietzsche).  In some European towns, gaze for long at the houses and the spectre of Rudolf Hess gazes back into you.  Attending the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) as a journalist, the author Rebecca West (1892–1983) perceived an abyss in Hess, writing he was “…so plainly mad… He looked as if his mind had no surface, as if every part of it had been blasted away except the depth where the nightmares lived.”  Imprisoned for life (Count 1: Conspiracy & Count 2: Crimes against peace) by the IMT (International Military Tribunal), Hess would spend some 46 years in captivity and when in 1987 he took his own life, he was the last survivor of the 21 who had stood in the dock to receive their sentences.  Opinion remains divided over whether Hess was “mad” in either the clinical or legal sense but his conduct during the trial and what is known of his decades in Berlin’s Spandau prison (the last 20-odd years as the vast facility’s sole inmate) does suggest he was at least highly eccentric.

The Beetle (Volkswagen Type 1)

First built before World War II (1939-1945), the Volkswagen (the construct being volks (people) + wagen (car)) car didn’t pick up the nickname “beetle” until 1946, the allied occupation forces translating it from the German Käfer and it caught on, lasting until the last one left a factory in Mexico in 2003 although in different places it gained other monikers, the Americans during the 1950s liking “bug” and the French coccinelle (ladybug) and as sales gathered strength around the planet, there were literally dozens of local variations, the more visually memorable including: including: bintus (Tortoise) in Nigeria, pulga (flea) in Colombia, ඉබ්බා (tortoise) in Sri Lanka, sapito (little toad) in Perú, peta (turtle) in Bolivia, folcika (bug) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, kostenurka (turtle) in Bulgaria, baratinha (little cockroach) in Cape Verde, poncho in Chile and Venezuela. buba (bug) in Croatia, boblen (the bubble), asfaltboblen (the asphalt bubble), gravid rulleskøjte (pregnant rollerskate) & Hitlerslæden (Hitler-sled) in Denmark. cepillo (brush) in the Dominican Republic, fakrouna (tortoise) in Libya, kupla (bubble) & Aatun kosto (Adi's revenge) in Finland, cucaracha (cockroach) in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, Kodok (frog) in Indonesia, ghoorbaghei (قورباغه ای) (frog) in Iran, agroga عكروكة (little frog) & rag-gah ركـّة (little turtle) in Iraq, maggiolino (maybug) in Italy, kodok (frog) in Malaysia, pulguita (little flea) in Mexico and much of Latin America, boble (bubble) in Norway, kotseng kuba (hunchback car) & boks (tin can) in the Philippines, garbus (hunchback) in Poland, mwendo wa kobe (tortoise speed) in Swahili and banju maqlub (literally “upside down bathtub”) in Malta.

A ground beetle (left), a first generation der Käfer (the Beetle, 1938-2003) (centre) and an "New Beetle" (1997-2011).  Despite the appearance, the "New Beetle" was of front engine & front-wheel-drive configuration, essentially a re-bodied Volkswagen Golf.  The new car was sold purely as a retro, the price paid for the style, certain packaging inefficiencies. 

A handy (and potentially life-saving) accessory for wartime KdF-Wagens was a passenger-side mount for a MP 40/41 Maschinenpistole (submachine gun), usually dubbed the Schmeisser by Allied troops on the basis German weapons designer Hugo Schmeisser (1884–1953) was responsible for the earlier and visually similar MP 18 (the world’s first mass-produced submachine gun).  Although he was not involved in the development of the MP 40, that weapon did use a magazine produced in accordance with one of his patents.

The Beetle (technically, originally the KdF-Wagen and later the Volkswagen Type 1) was one of the products nominally associated with the Nazi regime’s Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude (KdF, “Strength Through Joy”), the state-controlled organization which was under the auspices of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) which replaced the independent labor unions.  Operating medical services, cruise liners and holiday resorts for the working class, the KdF envisaged the Volkswagen as a European Model T Ford in that it would be available in sufficient numbers and at a price affordable by the working man, something made easier still by the Sparkarte (savings booklet) plan under which a deposit would be paid with the balance to be met in instalments.  Once fully paid, a Volkswagen would be delivered.  All this was announced in 1939 but the war meant that not one Volkswagen was ever delivered to any of those who diligently continued to make their payments as late as 1943.  Whether, even without a war, the scheme could have continued with the price set at a politically sensitive 990 Reichsmarks is uncertain.  That was certainly below the cost of production and although the Ford Model T had demonstrated how radically production costs could be lowered once the efficiencies of mass-production reached critical mass, there were features unique to the US economy which may never have manifested in the Nazi system, even under sustained peace although, had the Nazis won the war, from the Atlantic to the Urals they'd have had a vast pool of slave labor, a obvious way to reduce unit labor costs.  As it was, it wasn’t until 1964 that some of the participants in the Sparkarte were granted a settlement under which they received a discount (between 9-14%) which could be credited against a new Beetle.  Inflation and the conversion in 1948 from Reichsmark to Deutschmark make it difficult accurately to assess the justice of that but the consensus was Volkswagen got a good deal.  The settlement was also limited, nobody resident in the GDR (The German Democratic Republic, the old East Germany (1949-1990)) or elsewhere behind the iron curtain received even a Reichspfennig (cent).

Small, life-size & larger than life: A scale model (left), a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle (centre) and the “Huge Bug”, on the road with the 1959 Cabriolet used as a template.

Produced or assembled around the world between 1938-2003, over 21.5 million Beetles were made and there were also untold millions of scale models, ranging from small, colorful molded plastic toys distributed in cereal boxes (an early form of “indirect marketing” to children) through the ubiquitous “Matchbox Toys” to some highly detailed and expensive renditions, some powered by electric motors.  However, as far as in known, there's been only one “up-scaled” Beetle and so impressive was it in execution, until seen with objects (ideally a standard Beetle) to give some sense of the size, it’s not immediately obvious the thing is some 40% bigger.  While it may be tempting to call this a “Super Beetle” that would only confuse because the factory applied that label to a version introduced in 1970 and customers nick-named those “Super Bug” so that’s taken too; maybe “Big Bug” is best although the builders liked “Huge Bug”.

The Huge Bug was created by a Californian father and son team who disassembled a 1959 Beetle Cabriolet so the relevant components could be scanned and digitized, enabling versions 40% larger to be fabricated.  Built on the chassis of a Dodge Magnum, mechanical components were carried over so the Huge Bug features a specification which would have astonished Germans (or anyone else) in 1957, including a 345 cubic inch (5.7 litre) Hemi V8, automatic transmission, power steering, heated seats, air conditioning & power windows.  Not unexpectedly, whenever parked, the Huge Bug attracts those wanting a unique backdrop for selfies.  If the Huge Bug seems too conventional (if large) an approach, others have allowed their imagination to wander in other directions.

1953 Cadillac Series Sixty Special Fleetwood Sedan (left) and 1953 Volkswagen Beetle "Zwitter" (right).

Most cars produced by GM (General Motors) had a data-plate stamped “Body by Fisher” but, for a while, the Fleetwoods got “Body by Fleetwood” (Chevrolet’s GRP (glass-reinforced plastic) bodied Corvette would later get “Body by Chevrolet”).  The Volkswagen Beetle Zwitter was a “transitional” model produced between October 1952 and March 1953, blending the “Splittie” (a reference to the split rear-window) body shell with (variously) all or most of the upgraded mechanical components and interior fittings of the upcoming version with an oval rear window.  Zwitter was from the Middle High German zwitarn (bastard; hermaphrodite), from the Old High German zwitarn (bastard) but within the Beetle ecosystem the word is used in the sense of “hybrid”.

Exports of the Beetle to the US began modestly when in 1949 two were unloaded from a ship in New York Harbor and not until 1955 did sales begin to surge to the extent the car became the country’s biggest-selling import, remaining successful into the 1970s.  Between 1950-1953 the dealer network grew and the Beetle’s reputation for quality, durability and economy (though not performance) spread, appealing to those not attracted to the increasing size of what was then the standard US automobile.  In a 1953 edition of Mechanix Illustrated (1928-2001), Thomas McCahill (1907–1975) (sort of the H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) of automotive journalism) reviewed and was quite taken by by what he dubbed the “little Kraut clamshell”, impressed especially by details like the “...the bright Bosch headlights [that] bored a hole through the swirling snow and darkness.” (and this when Beetles used 6-volt electrics!).   McCahill picked a good time to conduct his test because  it coincided with the north-east getting “…wacked with an ice storm that did millions of dollars damage.”  That would have been quite a storm because a million dollars then was a lot of money but, despite it all, “this unlovely little beetle” coped with it all and as well as the ability to handle the roads, it was again the lights that made such an impression on McCahill, his report noting “...the headlights are so far superior to the US-legal sealed beams that comparison is ridiculous.  These Volkswagen lights (you must change them in many states and you can guess why) picked out fallen wires in their beam long before I got dangerously close.”  Whether the review played much of a part in the Beetle’s growing success in the US is uncertain but he did his bit, assuring readers: “…this German oil can sops up tough bumps and chuck holes as well as, if not better than a Fleetwood Cadillac.”  Although there wouldn't have been much cross-shopping between Beetles and Cadillacs (Fleetwoods or otherwise) the comparison was interesting.

Herbie, the love bug

Lindsay Lohan (left) among the Beetles (centre) on the red carpet for the Los Angeles premiere of Herbie Fully Loaded (2005), El Capitan Theater, Hollywood, Los Angeles, 19 June 19, 2005.  The Beetle (right) was one of the many replica “Herbies” in attendance and, on the day, Ms Lohan (using the celebrity-endorsed black Sharpie) autographed the glove-box lid, removed for the purpose.

In a Beetle it’s a simple task quickly to remove and re-fit a lid but unfortunately it was upside down when signed.  Autographs on glove-box lids (and other parts) are a thing and the most famous (and numerous) are those of Carroll Shelby (1923–2012) on Shelby American AC Cobras and Mustangs.  Many are authentic because for a donation to the Shelby foundation (typically around US$250) an owner could send to Shelby American headquarters in California a lid with a SSAE (stamped, self-addressed envelope) and it would come back duly signed and with a letter of authenticity (though one owner noted dryly the felt pen (silver ink) he’d enclosed wasn’t returned.  There are many slight variations in the signatures which hints they were done by hand and not an auto-pen although those that differ most are the ones signed while the lid was fixed to the car; for most it’s an unnatural action to sign on other than a flat, horizontal surface.  There are also some of questionable provenance, not all of which are on Cobra replicas built long after Carroll Shelby’s death and “Carroll Shelby glove-box signature vinyl transfer tapes” are available on-line in black, white and silver for as little as US$6.00.  Beware of imitations one might say but given there are over 50,000 “imitation” Cobras against a thousand-odd originals, the fake signature industry is sort of in the same spirit.

One of the cars used in the track racing sequences, now on display in the Peterson Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California (left), a Disney Pictures promotional image (centre) and a Herbie “replica” (with glove-box lid signed by Lindsay Lohan) built on a modified 1964 Beetle (right).

Before the release in 2005 of Herbie: Fully Loaded, following the first "Herbie" film (The Love Bug (1968)), there had been three sequels and a television series so the ecosystem of Herbie replicas (clones, tributes etc) was well-populated and as a promotional gimmick Disney Pictures invited fans to bring their replicas to line the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere.  Producing a “true” Herbie replica is technically possible but not all will be the same because even within each film there were variations in the appearance because a number of Beetles were required for the filming with not all identical in every visual aspect.  In post-production, there is a “continuity editor” who is tasked with removing or disguising such inconsistencies but minor details, especially if not in any way significant, often slip through something which delights the film obsessives who curate sites documenting the “errors”.  Among Beetle (especially the pre 1968 models) collectors there’s a faction of originality police (as uncompromising as any found in the communities patrolling vintage Ferraris, Corvettes, Jaguars, Porsches and such) and when the Herbie “replica” (above right) was offered for sale (as a “Herbie-Style 1964 Volkswagen Beetle Sunroof Sedan”) they were there to pounce, noting:

(1) The last year for the Golde folding sunroof was 1963, 1964 Sunroof Sedans fitted with a steel, sliding-roof.  The consensus was either the roof from an earlier Sunroof Sedan was spliced on or a hole was cut for salvaged Golde assembly to be installed.  Neither would be technically difficult for someone with the parts and skill but an inspection would be required to know which and on the basis of the photographs the work had been done well.

(2) The hood (“bonnet” over the frunk) was from an earlier model (with a pre-1963 Wolfsburg crest).

(3) The licence plate light was from 1963 (the updated engine and conversion to 12-volt electrics (both common in early Beetles) were disclosed in the sales blurb).

(4) The radio antenna was on the driver’s side whereas in the film it appears on the passenger’s side and there were many detail differences (decals and such) but there were inconsistencies also in the film.

Herr Professor Porsche

Herr Professor Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951) didn't exactly "invent" the concept of the Beetle but he was much involved in the design although Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) claimed to be the one who insisted on the use of an air-cooled engine because "not every rural doctor has a garage".  Porsche's appointment as a professor was a personal gift from the Führer who created them (he made his personal photographer a professor!) about as freely as he would later churn out Field Marshals.  There were many Volkswagens produced during the war but all were delivered either to the military or the Nazi Party organization where they were part of the widespread corruption endemic to the Third Reich, the extent of which wasn’t understood until well after the demise of the regime.  The wartime models were starkly utilitarian and this continued between 1945-1947 when production resumed to supply the needs of the Allied occupying forces, the bulk of the output being taken up by the British Army, the Wolfsburg factory being in the British zone.

Nerd humor:  "That's not a bug; it's a feature."  As all programmers know, if the audience is "right", many a "bug" can (at least temporarily while rushing to do a "bug-fix") be "explained away" as "a feature"; the linguistically adventurous sometimes preferring "undocumented feature".

As was the practice immediately after the war, the plan had been to ship the tooling to the UK and begin production there but the UK manufacturers, after inspecting the vehicle, pronounced it wholly unsuitable for civilian purposes and too primitive to appeal to customers.  Accordingly, the factory remained in Germany and civilian deliveries began in 1947, initially only in the home market but within a few years, export sales were growing and by the mid-1950s, the Beetle was a success even in the US market, something which must have seem improbable in 1949 when two were sold.  The platform proved adaptable too, the original two-door saloon and cabriolet augmented by a van on a modified chassis which was eventually built in a bewildering array of body styles (and made famous as the Kombi and Microbus (Type 2) models which became cult machines of the 1960s counter-culture) and the stylish, low-slung Karmann-Ghia (the classic Type 14 and the later Type 34 & Type 145 (Brazil), sold as a 2+2 coupé and convertible.  Later there would be attempts to use more modern body styling while preserving the mechanical layout (the Type 3, 1961-1973 and Type 4 (411/412), 1968-1974) but the approach was by the early 1970s understood to be a dead end although the concept was until 1982 pursued by Volkswagen's Brazilian operation.

Herr Professor Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951, left) and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945, right).

Herr Professor Ferdinand Porsche is describing to the Führer the salient features of the KdF-Wagen (Strength Through Joy car which, in the post-war years would become the Volkswagen (people's car) which, as the range proliferated would come to be called the "Type 1" (Beetle)).  The occasion was the ceremony marking the laying of the foundation stone at the site of the Volkswagen factory, in Germany's Lower Saxony region, 26 May 1938 (which Christians mark as the Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, commemorating the bodily Ascension of Christ to Heaven) (left).  The visit would have been a pleasant diversion for Hitler who was at the time immersed in planning for the Nazi's takeover of Czechoslovakia.

Later the same day, during a top-secret meeting, the professor would display to the party faithful a scale-model of an upcoming high-performance version.

The name of the location where the factory sat became well-known in the 1950s when Beetles spread around the world but the name Wolfsburg wasn't gazetted until May 1945 while the area was under occupation by the US Army, the name a reference to the nearly eponymous castle, the first known mention of which dates from 1302 in a document mentioning the structure as the seat of the noble lineage of Bartensleben.  The city had been founded by the Nazis on 1 July 1938 as the Stadt des KdF-Wagens bei Fallersleben (City of the Strength Through Joy car at Fallersleben), an example of a "company town" which, centred around the village of Fallersleben, included not only the industrial plant by also housing for workers and the associated service and recreational facilities.  As things were then done, the SS (ᛋᛋ in Armanen runes; Schutzstaffel 1923-1945 (literally “protection squadron” but translated variously as “protection squad”, “security section" etc) in 1942 established the nearby Arbeitsdorf concentration camp as a source of cheap (and expendable) labour but the experiment proved industrially inefficient and it was shut down after a few months.  Had the occupation authorities in May 1945 been aware that as early as the 1920s "Wolf" had been one of Hitler's code names and in subsequent years many children would know him as Onkel Wolf (Uncle Wolf), Wolfsburg may have been given a different name.

Herr Professor Porsche explains the Beetle's features.

The Beetle also begat what are regarded as the classic Porsches (the 356 (1948-1965), the 911 (1964-1998) and 912 (1965-1969 & 1976)).  Although documents filed in court over the years would prove Ferdinand Porsche’s (1875-1951) involvement in the design of the Beetle revealed not quite the originality of thought that long was the stuff of legend (as a subsequent financial settlement acknowledged), he was attached to the concept and for reasons of economic necessity alone, the salient features of the Beetle (the separate platform, the air-cooled flat engine, rear wheel drive and the basic shape) were transferred to the early post-war Porsches and while for many reasons features like liquid cooling later had to be adopted, the basic concept of the 1938 KdF-Wagen is still identifiable in today’s 911s.  The Beetle had many virtues as might be surmised given it was in more-or-less continuous production for sixty-five years during which over 20 million were made.  However, one common complaint was the lack of power, something which became more apparent as the years went by and average highway speeds rose.  The factory gradually increased both displacement & power and an after-market industry arose to supply those who wanted more, the results ranging from mild to wild.  One of the most dramatic approaches was that taken in 1969 by Emerson Fittipaldi (b 1946) who would later twice win both the Formula One World Championship and the Indianapolis 500.

The Fittipaldi 3200

Team Fittipaldi in late 1969 entered the Rio 1000 km race at the Jacarepagua circuit, intending to run a prototype with an Alfa Romeo engine but after suffering delays in the fabrication of some parts, it was clear there would be insufficient time to prepare the car.  No other competitive machine was immediately available so the decision was taken to improvise and build a twin-engined Volkswagen Beetle, both car and engines in ample supply, local production having begun in 1953.  On paper, the leading opposition (Alfa Romeo T33s, a Ford GT40 and a Lola T70 was formidable but the Beetle, with two tuned 1600 cm³ (98 cubic inch) engines, would generate some 400 horsepower in a car weighing a mere 407kg (897 lb) car.  Expectations weren't high and other teams were dismissive of the threat yet in qualifying, the Beetle set the second fastest time and in the race proved competitive, running for some time second to the leading Alfa Romeo T33 until a broken gearbox forced retirement.

Fittipaldi 3200, Interlagos, 1969.  The car competed on Pirelli CN87 Cinturatos (which were for street rather than race-track use) tyres which was an interesting choice but gearbox failures meant it never raced long enough for their durability to be determined.

The idea of twin-engined cars was nothing new, Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988) in 1935 having entered the Alfa Romeo Bimotor in the Grand Prix held on the faster circuits.  At the time a quick solution to counter the revolutionary new Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union race cars, the Bimotor had one supercharged straight-eight mounted at each end, both providing power to the rear wheels.  It was certainly fast, timed at 335 km/h (208 mph) in trials and on the circuits it could match anything in straight-line speed but the Achilles heel was that plaguing most twin-engined racing cars: high fuel consumption & tyre wear and a tendency to break drive-train components.  There were some successful adoptions when less powerful engines were used and the goal was traction rather than outright speed (such as the Citroën 2CV Sahara (694 of which were built between 1958-1971)) but usually there were easier ways to achieve the same thing.  Accordingly, while the multi-engine idea proved effective (indeed sometimes essential) when nothing but straight line speed was demanded (such as land-speed record (LSR) attempts or drag-racing), in events when corners needed to be negotiated, it proved a cul-de-sac.  There was certainly potential as the handful of "Twinis" (twin-engined versions of the BMC (British Motor Corporation) Mini (1959-2000) built in the 1960s demonstrated.  The original Twini had been built by constructor John Cooper (1923–2000 and associated with the Mini Cooper) after he'd observed a twin-engined Mini-Moke (a utilitarian vehicle based on the Mini's platform) being tested for the military.  Cooper's Twini worked and was rapid but after being wrecked in an accident (not directly related to the novel configuration), the project was abandoned.

How to have fun with a Beetle, American version: Add V8 engine.   

Still, in 1969, Team Fittipaldi had nothing faster available and while on paper, the bastard Beetle seemed unsuited to the task as the Jacarepagua circuit then was much twistier than it would become, it would certainly have a more than competitive  power to weight ratio, the low mass likely to make tyre wear less of a problem.  According to Brazilian legend, in the spirit of the Q&D (quick & dirty) spirit of the machines hurried assembly, after some quick calculations on a slide-rule, the design process moved rapidly from the backs of envelopes to paper napkins at the Churrascaria Interlagos Brazilian Barbecue House where steaks and red wine were ordered.  Returning to the workshop, most of the chassis was fabricated against chalk-marks on garage floor while the intricate linkages required to ensure the fuel-flow to the four Weber DC045 carburetors were constructed using cigarette packets as templates to maintain the correct distance between components.  In the race, the linkages performed faultlessly.

Fittipaldi 3200: The re-configuration of the chassis essentially transformed the rear-engined Beetle into a mid-engined car, the engines between the driver and the rear-axle line, behind which sat the transaxle.  

The chassis used a standard VW platform, cut just behind the driver’s seat where a tubular sub-frame was attached.  The front suspension and steering was retained although larger Porsche drum brakes were used in deference to the higher speeds which would be attained.  Remarkably, Beetle type swing axles were used at the rear which sounds frightening but these had the advantage of providing much negative camber and on the smooth and predictable surface of a race-track, especially in the hands of a race-driver, their behavior would not be as disconcerting as their reputation might suggest.  Two standard 1600cm³ Beetle engines (thus the 3200 designation) were fitted for the shake down tests and once the proof-of-concept had been verified, they were sent for tuning, high-performance Porsche parts used and the displacement of each increased to 2200cm³ (134 cubic inch).  The engines proved powerful but too much for the bottom end, actually breaking a crankshaft (a reasonable achievement) so the stroke was shortened, yielding a final displacement only slightly greater than the original specification while maintaining the ability to sustain higher engine speeds.

Fittipaldi 3200 (1969) schematic (left) and Porsche 908/01 LH Coupé (1968–1969) (right): The 3200's concept of a mid-engined, air-cooled, flat-eight coupe was essentially the same as the Porsche 908 but the Fittipaldi 3200's added features included drum brakes, swing axles and a driver's seat which doubled as the fuel tank.  There might have been some drivers of the early (and lethal) Porsche 917s who would have declined an offer to race the 3200, thinking it "too dangerous".

The rear engine was attached in a conventional arrangement through a Porsche five-speed transaxle although first gear was blanked-off (shades of the British trick of the 1950s which discarded the "stump-puller" first gear to create a "close ratio" three-speed box) because of a noted proclivity for stripping the cogs while the front engine was connected to the rear by a rubber joint with the crank phased at 90^o to the rear so the power sequenced correctly.  Twin oil coolers were mounted in the front bumper while the air-cooling was also enhanced, the windscreen angled more acutely to create at the top an aperture through which air could be ducted via flexible channels in the roof.   Most interesting however was the fuel tank.  To satisfy the thirst of the two engines, the 3200 carried 100 litres (26.4 (US) / 22 (Imperial) gallons) of a volatile ethanol-based cocktail in an aluminum tank which was custom built to fit car: It formed the driver’s seat!

Incongruity: The Beetle and the prototypes, Interlagos, 1969 

In the Rio de Janeiro 1000 kilometre race on the Guanabara circuit, the 3200, qualified 2^nd and ran strongly in the race, running as high as second, the sight of a Beetle holding off illustrious machinery such as a Porsche special, a Lola-Chevrolet R70, and a Ford GT40, one of motorsport’s less expected sights.  Unfortunately, in the twin-engined tradition (there have been some glorious failures and a handful of specialized successes), it proved fast but fragile, retiring with gearbox failure before half an hour had elapsed.  It raced once more but proved no more reliable.

How one can have a coffee in one's Beetle

Caffeine addiction is one of humanity’s most widespread vices (shared by just about everyone except the Mormons) and it extends to those driving cars.  In a famous tort case, Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, P.T.S., Inc. and McDonald's International, Inc (1994 Extra LEXIS 23 (Bernalillo County, N.M. Dist. Ct. 1994), 1995 WL 360309 (Bernalillo County, N.M. Dist. Ct. 1994), a passenger in a car (built in the primitive world of 1989 before cup holders were a thing) received severe burns from spilled coffee, just purchased from a McDonald’s drive-through.  Although the matter received much publicity on the basis it was absurd to be able to sue for being burned by spilling what was known by all to be “hot” and the case came to be cited as an example of “frivolous” litigation, there were technical reasons why some liability should have been imposed on McDonalds.  The jury awarded some US$2.6 million in damages although this was, on appeal, reduced to US$640,000 and the matter was settled out of court before a further appeal.

Hertella Auto Kaffeemaschine, 1959.  What could go wrong?

In the twenty-first century, some now judge cars on the basis of the count, capacity & convenience of its cup-holders but in the less regulated environment of the FRG (Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany; the old West Germany, 1949-1990)) of 1959, one company anticipated the future trend by offering a dashboard-mounted coffee maker for the VW Beetle.  The Hertella Auto Kaffeemaschine was not a success, presumably because even those not familiar with Sir Isaac Newton's (1642–1727) First Law of Motion (known also as the Law of Inertia: “An object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will continue in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced external force”) could visualise the odd WCS (worst case scenario).

A happy German caffeine addict, pouring himself a cup of coffee in his VW Beetle.

That it was in 1959 available in 6v & 12v versions is an indication Hertella may have envisaged a wider market because VW didn’t offer a 12v system as an option until 1963 and the company seems to have given some thought to Newtonian physics, the supplied porcelain cups fitted at the base with a disc of magnetic metal providing some resistance to movement although the liquid obviously moved as forces (including lateral) were applied.  The apparatus was mounted with a detachable bracket, permitting the pot to be removed for cleaning.  The quality of the coffee was probably not outstanding because there was no percolation; the coffee added in a double-layer screen and “brewed” on much the same basis as one would prepare tea-leaves and for those who value quality, a thermos-flask would have been a better choice but there would have been caffeine addicts willing to try the device.  The trouble was there clearly weren’t many of them and even in the FRG of the Wirtschaftswunder (the post war “economic miracle”) the fairly high price would have deterred many although now, one in perfect condition (especially if accompanied by the precious documents or packaging) would command a price well over US$1000.

How to advertise a Beetle

Although the popular perception of motoring in the US during the 1960s is it was all about gas-guzzling behemoths and tyre-smoking muscle cars no less thirsty, Detroit’s advertising did not neglect to mention fuel economy and the engineers always had in the range a combination of power-train and gearing options for those for whom that was important; it was a significant if unsexy market.  However, the advertising for domestic vehicles, whatever the segment, almost always emphasised virtues like attractiveness and, in the era of annual product updates, made much of things being “new”.  Volkswagen took a different approach, centred around the “Think Small” campaign, created by the advertising agency DDB (Doyle Dane Bernbach).  Positioning VW Beetle ownership as a kind of inverted snobbery, the campaign embraced simplicity and honesty, quite a contrast with the exaggerations common at the time.  The technique was ground-breaking and its influences have been seen in the decades since.

The key theme was one of self-deprecating humor which took the criticisms of the car (quirky, small, ugly, lacking luxuries) and made a headline of them, emphasising instead attributes such as reliability, fuel efficiency, and affordability, all done with some wry observations.  Whether making a virtue of the by then dubious qualities of swing axles (centre right) convinced many is uncertain but the "Why are the wheels crooked" one dates from 1962, some three years before the publication of Ralph Nader's (b 1934) Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) in which a chapter was devoted to the troubling behavior swing axles induced in early versions (1960-1964) of the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair (1960-1969).  Still, the focus on authenticity had real appeal in a consumerist age when agencies produced elaborate graphics and full-color photographs taken in exotic locations: VW’s monochromatic look was emblematic of the machine being advertised, one which in 1969 still looked very similiar to one from 1955.  A key to the success of the campaign was the template: most of the upper part of the page usually a single image of a Beetle, a caption beneath and then the explanatory text.  Collectively, the advertisements would now be called "a narrative".

Spoof in National Lampoon's Encyclopedia of Humor (1973).

The US magazine National Lampoon (1970-1998) ran a parody in the style of VW’s campaign in their Encyclopedia of Humor (1973).  The "If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be President today" piece not only borrowed the template but also reprised VW’s claim of “watertight construction” which had appeared in one of the manufacturer’s genuine advertisements.  Although what the magazine did was protected under the constitution’s first amendment (freedom of speech; freedom of the press) other legal remedies beckoned and Volkswagen filed suit claiming (1) violations of copyright and their trademark and (2) defamation.  Apparently, a number of those who had seen the spoof believed it to be real and the company was receiving feedback from the outraged vowing never to buy another VW, a reaction familiar at scale in the age of X (formerly known as Twitter) but which then required writing a letter, putting it in an envelope, affixing a postage stamp and dropping it in the mailbox.  So pile-ons happened then but they took longer to form.  In a settlement, National Lampoon undertook to (1) withdraw all unsold copies of the 450,000 print run (2) destroy the piece’s hot plate (in pre-digital printing, a physical “plate” was created onto which ink was laid to create the printed copy) and (3) publish in the next issue Volkswagen's explanatory disclaimer of involvement.  National Lampoon was also estopped from using the spoof for any subsequent purpose.

The 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 which Ted Kennedy crashed into the water under Dike Bridge Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts.

The notorious incident the parody referenced was the “Chappaquiddick Incident” in which Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) drove off a bridge, shortly before midnight on 18 July 1969, after the then senator had left a cocktail party in the company of Miss Mary Jo Kopechne (1940-1969) who had worked on Robert F Kennedy’s (RFK, 1925–1968; US attorney general 1961-1964) presidential campaign in 1968.  Miss Kopechne died in the crash, Senator Kennedy not reporting the matter for more than ten hours after he left the scene.  The Oldsmobile belonged to Kennedy's mother, despite old Joe Kennedy (1888–1969) once having asserted "The Kennedys drive Buicks!".  By the time Mary Jo Kopechne died, the company had already retired the Delmont nameplate after a two-year run. Kennedy received a two month, suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident but while his political career continued for decades, he never succeeded in his attempts to become president and his conduct in the Chappaquiddick Incident contributed to that although as one notorious interview in 1979 revealed, apart from his sense of entitlement, he could disclose no good reason why he should be POTUS, struggling even to answer the question.

Volkswagen's genuine "watertight construction" advertisement which inspired National Lampoon.  It was one of the few in the series to be run in color and that was because water really didn't look like "water" in monochrome.

Years after the Chappaquiddick Incident, when Ted was the only of the brothers left alive, Pat Buchanan (b 1938; US paleoconservative and advisor to many Republican presidents) interviewed Richard Nixon (1913-1994; VPOTUS 1953-1961 & POTUS 1969-1974), their discussions including the former president’s reminiscences of politicians he’d known.  Broadcast of CNN’s Crossfire programme on 9 November 1982, among those remembered were the Kennedys and Nixon pronounced Ted the best and most natural politician while Robert was driven and intense, “like a seventeenth century Jesuit priest”, a phrase he attributed to Theodore Roosevelt’s (TR, 1858–1919; VPOTUS 1901 & POTUS 1901-1909) daughter Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980).  John Kennedy (JFK, 1917–1963; POTUS 1961-1963) he thought “quite a shy person” for whom the public aspect of politics was “an effort”, albeit one he performed very well.  Nixon was a flawed character but in his (enforced) retirement, he was a fair judge of the politicians he knew and long after he died, an outtake from the interview sessions was released which included some “off the record” comments about Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; VPOTUS 1961-1963 & POTUS 1963-1969).

Nixon on the Kennedys and LBJ.

At that time, the first volume (The Path to Power (1982)) of Robert Caro’s (b 1935) biography of LBJ had, to well-deserved acclaim, just been published and, during a commercial break and perhaps unaware the cameras were still rolling, Nixon leaned towards Buchanan and, sotto voce, remarked that Caro “…makes him look like a goddamn animal”, pausing to add “…of course he was… he was a man”.  Nixon knew LBJ well and as a political operative, ranked him with Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR, 1882–1945, POTUS 1933-1945) as the finest of the century.  Caro’s biography of LBJ is one of the most comprehensive of its kind with the fourth volume published in 2012; that took the story to 1964 and the fifth volume remains a work in progress with the manuscript now said to be 1,000 pages odd.  Because it will cover his tumultuous presidency that began with such promise before being consumed by the military involvement in the Far East, there’s obviously much material to be considered and the author (now almost 90) has revealed that should he die, the draft will not be completed by somebody else but will be published “as is”.  So vast is Caro’s work, unless some remarkable new material emerges, it’s hard to believe anyone will for at least decades write another biography of LBJ.

Nixon on “Beetle” Smith and the role of those subordinate to the president.

General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith (1895–1961) on several occasions between 1943-1945 served as General Dwight Eisenhower’s (1890-1969; POTUS 1953-1961) chief of staff and in the post war years held a number of appointments including Director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) between 1950-1953.  In the interview with Buchanan, “Beetle” was also discussed and Nixon’s comments may have been brought to the attention of Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025) who would have agreed with every word.  Even in MAGA (Make America Great Again) circles there are some who probably prefer not to take political advice from Richard Nixon but Mr Trump is known to be an admirer and is probably much taken with Mr Nixon (who was a trained lawyer!) opinion that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal”.  As a legal principle, that's not quite the "divine right of presidents" but quite a leap from the pages of the US constitution.  Still, wholly it accords with the observation by US journalist Norman Cousins (1915-1990): “Richard Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three”.  Some of the antics of Trump White House suggest the method may be being dabbled with.