Monthly Archives: December 2011

Jews of the Week: Siegfried Marcus, Emil & Mercedes Jellinek

Car Inventors

Siegfried Marcus - Car Inventor

Siegfried Marcus – Car Inventor

In 1870, German-Austrian Jew Siegfried Marcus (1831-1898) had the bright idea of putting a combustion engine on a handcart, creating the first-ever self-propelling vehicle powered by gasoline. In 1883, Marcus received the patent for the ignition system, leading to the first official automobile as we know it, called the “Second Marcus Car”. Thus was born the automobile industry, the internet of its day that immeasurably revolutionized the world. Meanwhile, fellow (non-Jewish) Germans Daimler and Maybach created the first car for market.

Son of a rabbi, Emil Jellinek made it happen

However, they could not sell their version until Emil Jellinek (1853-1918), the son of Hungarian-Czech Rabbi Aaron Jellinek, took over the business. He convinced Maybach to build a new and improved car, to be called Mercedes, named after his daughter Mercedes Jellinek. (“Mercedes” is a Spanish name that was given to the girl by her French-Sephardic mother, whom Emil Jellinek married during his time in France.) The Mercedes quickly shattered all records, going 60 km/h and easily winning the competitive Nice races. It was branded “the car of tomorrow” and took the world by storm. In the 1930s, the Nazi Ministry for Propaganda attempted to rewrite history by expunging any evidence of Marcus being the inventor of the car and giving credit to Daimler and Benz.

This is Mercedes – Jellinek that is

First Marcus Car of 1870

 

Words of the Week

No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy and art have been the main guiding light in modern faith and culture. Personally, I have always been on the side of both…
– Winston Churchill

Second Marcus Car of 1888

Jews of the Week: Matityahu & the Maccabees

The Hebrew Hammers

Happy Hanukkah!

After massive assimilation of Jews to the Hellenistic lifestyle, the Greek-Seleucid king Antiochus decided to put an end to traditional Judaism for good. He outlawed Shabbat and holiday observance, banned circumcision and Torah study. The Temple in Jerusalem was captured and a statue of Zeus erected within it. Antiochus planned to seal the deal with a request of the Jews to sacrifice a pig to the Greek gods. Incredibly, many Jews agreed, wooed by Hellenism. But one man, Matityahu, stood up for the truth and declared “Even if all the nations that live under the rule of the king obey him, I and my sons and my brothers will live by the covenant of our fathers… Follow me, all of you who are for God’s law and stand by the covenant.” Thus started what may be the world’s first religious war. Matityahu and his five sons organized a rebel army based in Modi’in, led by Matityahu’s son Yehuda, nicknamed Maccabee – “the Hammer”. The war lasted nearly 30 years. At its height, the Maccabees had no more than 12,000 fighters, while the Greeks had a massive professional army with war elephants (under which Judah’s brother Elazar was trampled in a heroic feat). Meanwhile, children carried small spinning tops to conceal the fact they were secretly learning Torah. Two great miracles occurred: the Jews defeated the world-superpower Seleucid Greeks, and when they reclaimed the Temple and purified it of idolatry, one kosher jug of oil burned for 8 days. Light was restored to the Jewish people.

Chag Sameach!

Words of the Week

A Jew is a lamplighter. The lamplighter walks the streets carrying a flame at the end of a stick. He knows that the flame is not his. And he goes from lamp to lamp to set them alight.
– Rabbi Sholom DovBer of Lubavitch

Jews of the Week: Martin Cooper and Joel Engel

Inventing the Cellphone

Cellphone Inventor

Martin Cooper & DynaTAC

Though many people were involved in the production of the cellphone, credit is given to Martin Cooper (b. 1928), nicknamed the “father of the cellphone”, who made the first cellular phone call in New York on April 3, 1973. Cooper was the executive of Motorola, and placed the first-ever cellphone call to his major competitor Joel S. Engel (b. 1936), a fellow Jew who was also working on cellphone technology. Engel participated in the Apollo space program and worked for AT&T before becoming the research head at Bell Labs, where he had previously co-led the team that developed “the architecture of the cellular network and its parameterization”. Meanwhile, Martin Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukranian-Jewish immigrants. Besides the cellphone, he had many more contributions to radio and communications technology, including “Cooper’s Law”, named in his honour. He went on to become Vice-President and Corporate Director at Motorola, which opened its first branch outside the U.S. in Israel. Their first phone was the DynaTAC, which weighed 1 kilogram and cost $9,000 (adjusting for inflation). Cooper described it as such: “The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.” He said that his inspiration for the cellphone came from Captain Kirk’s Communicator device on Star Trek!

Words of the Week

Joel Engel

We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.

– Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah