fact
The Brooklyn Dodgers name stems from a nickname given in the 1890s to people who, in a matter of life and death, had to evade railcars speeding down the streets. They were known as trolley dodgers. Trolleys were new inventions, which led to two issues. First, cities lacked the safety infrastructure which protects pedestrians today […]
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Neanderthals, which were traditionally thought of as extremely primitive humans, are now believed to have been extremely intelligent, even comparable to the intelligence of modern humans. They used tools, had social structures, thrived in hostile environments, and lived long lives.
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You remember when you were a kid and you do something wrong, and then you have to decide whether to come clean with your parents or make something up instead, and you always choose the excuse and it’s never a good idea?
I think it’s because most human beings can sniff out a lie and a coverup, a misdirection, even when we’re not trying to (and that goes double for parents).
Here are 12 times full-grown adults tried to cover up huge mistakes, only to have it not really work at all.
Katyn Massacre: Red Army troops during WWII killed and buried 22,000 Polish officers. The German Army found this mass grave and asked the local SS Commander if it was his graves. The SS Commander said it wasn’t his graves.
The Red Army though insisted it was the Nazis that did it. Boris Yeltsin later admitted to grave in 1992.
The soviet union trying to say that Chernobyl wasn’t as big a deal as it actually was.
One of my grandparents’ neighbors in Poland was a Belorussian guy from one of the closest towns to Chernobyl in Belarus.
The plant is basically on the Ukraine/Belarus border, and a huge amount of fallout happened in Belarus.
No one was informed until everyone else was, even though they got almost as much fallout as Prypiat. The way he describes it, they were across the border, so they didn’t want to share. Even when they did, the Belarusian gov maintained the thought process that it wasn’t a big deal, like the USSR was claiming.
No one was to be relocated. He was a teenager at the time and left for Minsk as soon as he could because of how pissed off the whole thing made him. His whole family stayed except for him, farming away while he was in the city and then moved to Poland after he met his Polish wife.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of his family died of cancer.
Volkswagen and the emission dodging.
The crazy part of that story to me was always just how brazen they were about it.
If you hear the quick summary (VW realized their system wouldn’t pass the emissions test, so they developed software that detected when an emissions test was being conducted, and changed the engine’s operation to a mode that was much less fuel-efficient, but would pass the test), you would probably think the system was just being tweaked.
Maybe normal operating emissions were 1.5x, or something like that… but since it was a scandal, maybe it was more like 3-5x? They couldn’t have possibly designed a system that was too far off – they would have gone back to the lab if it was 10x, right?
Nope. It was more like 40x the limit.
The water crisis in Flint.
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha had been in touch with the Genesee Department of Health for months about Elevated Lead Levels (ELLs), and they went out of their way to obfuscate the data and make it seem like everything was normal. Dr. Hanna-Attisha brings in a research team from Virginia which shows that the ELLs are correlated with zip codes that recently switched water supplies. They still ignore/deny what’s happening. Finally, Dr. Hanna-Attisha says “fuck it”, and holds a press conference telling people that their water is unsafe and to stop using it immediately.
A major public health crisis could have been mitigated if the public health officials spent more time doing their job and less time worrying about whether or not it pisses the governor off
i guess the Streisand effect?
for those who don’t know, someone took a photo of Barbara Streisand’s Malibu home and posted it online. The photo didn’t get much attention until Barbara Streisand tried to have the photo blocked for the sake of her privacy.
Upon hearing that Streisand wanted the photo removed, the image became forbidden fruit and was viewed millions of times across the internet.
If she hadn’t tried to cover it up, no one would have looked.
Anyone mentioned Joe Michael Singer yet? And his rich daddy trying to use DMCA takedowns to remove images of his son violently assaulting two shop clerks.
Every video that gets taken down, three more spring up.
Basically any case involving a dead about-to-be whistle blower. Killing someone is a good way to shut a person up. Its also a very good way of drawing attention to the person and what they had to say. The best way to cover something up is discredit the whistle blower.
Ex-UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi paid $175k to have the 2011 pepper spray incident removed from Google search results for the university, which brought the incident back into the public eye and was one of the scandals that eventually led to her resignation.
Recent Polk County, Florida deputies losing (stealing) cash evidence, trying to cover it up, and getting fired.
In 1973 the director of the CIA Richard Helms was worried that the watergate congressional investigations would spill over into investigations into the CIA so he ordered the destruction of all documents related to the MKUltra program.
20,000 documents were incorrectly stored with financial records and were not destroyed. They were later uncovered during an FOIA request and turned over to Congress.
When EA tried to explain why it takes 6 quadrillion hours to unlock Darth Vader and got downvoted into oblivion.
Errr, that is vastly underselling it. The blowback wasn’t “being downvoted”.
That blowback was that it really kickstarted a movement and global awareness about loot crates, micro-transactions, and targeting minors and people with gambling issues with luck based purchases that continues to this day. It wasn’t just “why do I have to buy things to have any chance of realistically unlocking characters” it was “why do I have to buy luck based objects (see: gambling) for a chance to unlock the best content”
They basically opened their big stupid mouths about an issue only select people in the industry talked about, and said “Hey, our business model is really parasitic, and the fact that we are trying to call them “surprise mechanics” to avoid the term gambling is a big warning there is a ton of fuckery afoot.
Shortly after Belgium banned it affecting not just that game, but FIFA and other big revenue whales, and other countries are still threatening to follow suit or greatly limit loot crates + microtransactions.
Putin becoming used in millions of memes because the Russian Government tried to ban his likeness used in memes.
You’d think that people would learn, but they really don’t.
If you’ve got something to add to this list, put it down in the comments!
The post Major Cover Ups That Really Backfired For People appeared first on UberFacts.
When something bad happens – on purpose, an accident, whatever – that hurts or has the potential to hurt people, the best thing is to own up to it immediately so that the fallout can be mitigated as quickly as possible.
Now, that might be the truth (and common sense) but for a lot of people, trying to cover up a huge bungle is just a knee-jerk reaction – and here are 11 times that people definitely should have just owned up to the mistake from the get-go.
Anything Japan did in WW2, now Japan just denies everything, but they tried. Unit 731 isn’t communist propaganda anymore. John Rabe was an angel of a Nazi.
Same thing happened with the Armenian genocide, an alarming number of genocides really.
Andrew Cuomo and the covid nursing home death issue.
Opened the floodgates for not just criticism of his leadership, but it removed the ability for him to retaliate against the people’s he’s sexually harassed.
He’s gone from a liberal hero to a pariah in a few weeks.
The U S Army trying to cover up the cause of death for SSG. Ryan Maseth, they tried to say it was a suicide until Ryan’s mother got it investigated and it came out that the cause was a ungrounded water pump that had been signed off by two American electricians working for KBR in Iraq.
Ryan’s mother tried to sue and it went up to the supreme court where they ruled they could not allow KBR to be sued because they were to vital to national defense. At least the truth was told.
Tons of memes here but does anyone member the Beyonce photo that her manager demanded be taken down?
That worked well.
Beyoncé had a kind of unflattering picture of her taken from her Super Bowl performance and she looked like she was deadlifting a heavy weight or taking a huge dump and her manager tried to get it removed from the internet and instead it backfired and became a huge meme.
It was in no way a major cover-up but At my school one of the teachers got caught drunk driving but for some reason the school just called everybody he was sick and would not be at school for a couple days.
Of course what they did not realize what is that the officer who arrested him had a kid who went to our school and by the end of the day literally everybody was talking about it and even the gave him crap for it after he came back.
In 1974, Karen Silkwood was found dead, as a result of a car crash. Silkwood was a chemical technician and labor union activist who was about the reveal the safety hazards.
Despite drugs found on the scene, the police and coroner didn’t believe the drug claim and went looking for other likely others. After being informed about death threats from her family, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the State Medical Examiner found radioactive contamination in her body.
This prompted an investigation at Kerr-McGee, the company Silkwood was talking about, which reveal the very problems that were about to going to be exposed to the media. Kerr-McGee had to pay up for what was done as they were held liable.
Check out what’s been happening in the Australian Parliament House….
Attorney general accused of historical r*pe (PM says he’s an innocent man without having done any investigation)
Alleged r*pe in parliament house in a female MPs office (guy got shifted on because of “security breaches”)
Multiple members of staff wanked over a female MPs desk, recorded it and shared it around with each other
Just some of the action that came from the AG trying to cover-up an historical r*pe.
Oh! And the thousands of women who marched for justice at parliament house and were told that the PM would only talk to a small delegation if they went into parliament house…which they obviously were not keen to be doing.
I’d describe Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein as perpetrators of massive cover-ups that backfired!!
As of right now, the Epstein cover up seems pretty successful due to the lack of indictments and convictions considering the alleged scope. I get that JE was convicted and Jizlane is in jail, but the amount of people alleged to be involved that are still on cable news networks, holding public office, etc. makes it seem to me as being pretty successful. Hopefully that changes!
I think the whole “fappening” kerfuffle was made much worse by all the media coverage and celeb statements. The nudes would still have been seen by lots of people, but I’d say 10x more people saw them simply because of the people going online saying “DON’T LOOK AT THIS!”.
Forbidding someone from doing something. That famously efficacious method of getting them to not do the thing. With its long track record of successes, including Prohibition, the War on Drugs, Abstinence-Only Sex Ed, and deleting any mention of Aimee Challenor.
Whatever it was Saudi Arabia tried when they murdered an American journalist in their Turkish Embassy, only for the Turkish government to call them out on it when they tried lying about it.
I had literally never heard of Jamal Khashoggi in my life until the Saudi leader decided to have him killed.
Assassinating a journalist on foreign soil was a much bigger hit to their reputation than any articles Khashoggi had written so it really was just tremendously stupid.
The response to Covid 19. PBS has a nice retrospective doc on youtube detailing the evidence that the chinese government knew that had a new SARS-like virus among the public, and all of the lengths they took to forbid any information being shared about it, mostly because they didn’t want to cause any public panic.
Obviously a backfire as it lead to the massive sh%t show that was 2020
Talk about making a mess ten times worse. Woof.
Can you think of another bungled cover up that belongs on this list? Share it in the comments!
The post Times When People Tried to Cover Up Something Major and Made It Worse appeared first on UberFacts.
In Italy during the 16th century music was engraved on knives so guests could sing together after they ate. Each side of the blade has musical notations and each knife represents one part for a singer. So, a complete set of knives actually come together to create a harmonious chorus.
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In pre-20th century European culture, red hair was commonly identified as the distinguishing negative Jewish trait. During the Spanish Inquisition, all those with red hair were identified as Jewish; and writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair.
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There are certain countries in the world that a majority of people would say they would love to visit – Italy, France, England, China, Ireland, Australia…
My list actually goes on and on, because there’s hardly anywhere I wouldn’t like to go if I had the chance!
Some (or all) of these beloved countries have dark histories and lesser-known facts, though, so before you visit, here are 16 things you might like to know.
During ww2 japan used living POW’s for bayonet practice.
The Japanese were worse than the nazis in some ways. The difference is Germany knows their dark history and paid for it.
Japan swept it all under the rug and never paid for or owned up to their war crimes.
In Egypt , sexual harassment is like the air , everywhere. Something every woman must live with.
I don’t know if it’s the same now, but I travelled around Egypt for a few weeks in the late nineties when I was in my early twenties. I had a couple of rather forceful attempts against me (as a man). I learnt to be quite careful using a public toilet.
Here in Colombia we have enough material to have a dedicated post, but for mentioning one….
In 1928, a banana company workers ceased their production and got in protests. They wanted better work conditions because They worked a lot for the crap of payment they got.
The government’s response was send the national army to shoot a place where between 2000 and 4000 people were sleeping or relaxing. Officially 13 people died, but the people there told that number was faked and the death counter was a lot higher
New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the OECD.
New Zealand also has some of the highest rates of bullying (in school and in the workplace). Everyone talks about how nice Kiwis are… but in addition to the ‘macho’ culture (and maybe along with it) there is this big, dark, ugly underbelly of wide spread bullying.
I can imagine that this very much contributes to high suicide rates.
Mongolia wiped nearly 11% of the ENTIRE world population off the face of the planet.
The largest acts of mass killing/genocide in human history.
It literally changed our carbon footprint by an estimated 700 million tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere during the 13th century.
The Dutch once ate their prime minister.
When Johan de Witt – the ‘Grand Pensionary’ (in effect, prime minister) of the Dutch Republic – was killed along with his brother in 1672, there are accounts of some among the mob taking parts of the bodies and eating them.
New Zealand: high rates of child abuse, hidden poverty and a housing crisis on the brink (not enough housing and what there is is extremely expensive to both rent and buy and rapidly rising at a ridiculous rate. It’s also not particularly high quality).
On Toronto’s beaches up to the mid 1950s, it was common to see signs that read “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”
During WWII, the Swiss National Bank accepted large quantities of gold from the German Reichsbank.
It was payment for Swiss export shipments(weapons, ammunition..).
A large part of this Reichsbank gold had either been looted by the German occupying forces from the stocks of the occupied countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.), or it came from the victims of the Nazi persecution of the Jews [Holocaust].
Canada had a cult leader named Roch Thériault of Ant Hill Kids who did some VERY VERY disturbing things to his followers and the children.
Also the podcast “Cults” had an episode on them but they even left out the worse things they did.
Canada is the biggest producer of asbestos in the world, although using the product is banned in the country.
“In 2009, about 9% of the world’s asbestos production was mined in Canada. In late 2011, Canada’s remaining two asbestos mines, both located in Quebec, halted operations. In September 2012, the Quebec government halted asbestos mining.”
France had concentration camps… in 1936 for Spanish immigrants who fled the Civil War.
They also had concentration camps in Algeria in the 1960’s, and a weird bit of bureaucracy where they didn’t call them camps.
Norway used to suppressed the natives from up north, by separating them from their parents and forcing norwegian culture upon them.
Learning norwegian and how to live like a norwegian.
Bhutan forcibly expelled Hindus in order to create its “happy” paradise.
Yes.. Uncle was working for UN during the whole Bhutanese Refugee situation in Nepal. He said they were kicked out by the country. There is a large Bhutanese refugee community in Baltimore.
From the 1700s up to 1996, Ireland was home to “Magdalene Laundries,” basically labor camps run by the Catholic Church for “Fallen Women” who had sex outside of marriage (a lot of time the women were SA survivors who’d been molested/impregnated by priests or male relatives)
If you’ve ever looked at a country like Liechtenstein on a map and wondered how a country that small can maintain a flourishing economy the answer is that they’re one of the largest offshore banking sites in the world.
Most people only think of the Cayman Islands when it comes to offshore banking but the Cayman Islands aren’t even close to being the only place where rich people stash their money to avoid paying taxes on it. Most of the places that do it are territories and not countries (the Cook Islands, Anguila, Jersey and Guernsey are a few other big offshore banking sites) but Liechtenstein has made it the core of their economy.
I had no idea!
Do you know any other weird facts about these countries that might give people pause?
Share the with us in the comments.
The post Dark Facts About Countries That Most People Love appeared first on UberFacts.
After the crazy year all of us just lived through, I’m really hoping that humanity and society are only headed in an upward trajectory, but I guess you never really know, right?
And that’s why this conversation will be interesting because it’s kind of hard to imagine any of us being nostalgic for a whole lot of anything from right now…
So, what will people be nostalgic for four decades from now?
Here’s what folks on AskReddit had to say.
“Physical media so you don’t have to micropay for every movie you feel like watching.
When the DVDs and Blu-Rays are no longer in the stores, there will be no reason for streaming services to charge a flat rate.”
“So many of the amazing movies made in the 2000s.
Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, many of the Cristopher Nolan movies.
I’m convinced these newer classics will be enjoyed for decades to come.”
“Paper and metal currency.
Virtual money, wire transfers, alternative finance models, blockchain money will be a norm I anticipate.
It is coming faster than we think.”
“The golden days before covid-25 when you just had to wear a mask instead of a full Hazmat suit.”
“Contemporary weather patterns and jet streams.
Lack of maa migration and climate change refugees.
Clean beaches.
Peace in India.”
“Driving.
Cars will be 100% automated and it will be illegal to drive your own car on roadways unless you have a special license, because it will be so dangerous.”
There will be amusement parks where you can drive a car all by yourself.
“Privacy.
Nothing would be private. No one would be able to run away, go rogue. You’ll be traced everywhere by cameras, by sensors, by people.
Enjoy privacy while it lasts.”
“Breathable air.
Swimmable water.
Polar bears and whales.”
“Corporations will look back fondly on the days when they do whatever with little to no consequences, besides financial
Targeted advertisements and content is in it’s infancy now, 20 years from now it will be a grown up. Picture Minority Report, where ads are calling your name as you walk down the street.”
“The days when we could go to huge concerts and walk around without masks.”
“I honestly fell it’ll be V8 vehicles.
I’m not talking about those crazy luxurious ones, but as a German car lover I noticed many of those V8 Benz, BMW, Audi swap out for V6 turbos.
Cars like E92, next gen C63, 2016 and prior RS5.”
“Learning how to drive.
I saw an ad for a self-driving car service that worked kinda like Uber, from what I can tell.
Eventually everyone’s gonna have self-driving cars and learning to do it yourself will probably the present-day equivalent of learning to ride a horse-drawn carriage.”
“Cashiers.
They were already slowly being replaced by self checkouts, and now covid has put a rush on it.”
“Large animals. Rhinos, elephants, orangutans, giraffes.
I have little faith that we won’t destroy the world. Looking at the old onesies from our kids pajamas that we packed in a box showing safari animals will become as extinct as dinosaurs.
But more painful.”
Have you thought about what you might be nostalgic for 40 years from now?
If so, please fill us in in the comments.
We’d love to hear from you!
The post What Will People Be Nostalgic for in 40 Years? Here’s What People Had to Say. appeared first on UberFacts.
There are examples throughout history of people who guessed, knew, or figured something out a long time before anyone.
And in general, they were usually written off as huge kooks.
Most of us have trouble believing in what we can’t see, and it turns out that we’re also a bit mean to the people who don’t – but these 15 people stuck to their guns, no matter who called them nuts.
But it was all good in the end, when they were proved to be right.
Sinead O’Connor
Younger Redditors might not know who she is but she was a singer/songwriter from Ireland who was a staple in the Alternative Music scene during the late 80s and early to mid 90s who had some cross-over hits.
Anyway, at the height of her popularity she was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live after canceling an earlier scheduled spot in protest against the guest host which was some dumba$s standup comic from the 80s called Andrew Dice Clay (As Scott Thompson described him: “it’s as if someone took your grandmother, the one who can’t speak English, and taught her to swear phonetically, gave her a special on HBO and made her a star”).
During her performance she sang an acapella version of Bob Marley’s “War” changing the lyrics to make it about child sexual abuse instead of racism. At the end of the performance she shouted something like “Fight the real enemy” and ripped up a picture of the pope.
In the following weeks people lost their shit and on the next episode of Saturday Night Live they had at least 3 sketches that tore her apart. A few years later the Catholics S^x Abuse Scandal broke internationally.
The ex-husband of my ex-girlfriend . Turns out he wasn’t the crazy one after all. He kept trying to tell me and if I would have listened from the beginning I could have saved 4 years of my life.
About ten years ago there was this stoner who always hung around the shop that I played Magic at. One day, he told me that he didn’t trust Jared from Subway. I said that there was nothing to worry about and that the only thing that Jared did was eat sandwiches. He said that there was something really sinister about Jared, and that he could tell just by looking at him.
Courtney Love and her quip about Weinstein.
It’s still wild to me that people will villainize someone while knowing damn well they are speaking the truth.
That one journalist Gary Webb that uncovered the truth that the CIA aided and abetted Nicaraguan contra rebels in funneling cocaine into inner city communities.
And then he was blackballed and later killed himself.
There is actually a book about Gary Webb, his investigation, and the aftermath called Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou.
The classic example, of course, is Cassandra; in Greek mythology she was cursed to know the future, but for no one to believe her when she told them.
My mom. Turns out being Emo was really just a phase.
Johnny Rotten said in an interview that he knew Jimmy Savile was into all kinds of “seediness”.
People dismissed it as typical Johnny Rotten anti establishment talk (for which he is famous).
As it turned out, he was right.
The people who said the government was spying on its citizens.
The people who discovered prions.
All the other biologists thought they were crazy to suggest one protein could be an infectious agent.
Nope those biologists were wrong and Nobel prizes were awarded.
Corey Feldman.
Dude went on national TV to tell everyone that there was a network of sexual abusers in Hollywood, and that he himself had been abused, and people LAUGHED AT HIM and shunned him.
And then it came out that pretty much everything he was saying was true.
Me. About my (now disowned) cousin.
He kept stealing things from me which my family felt was no big deal. But it escalated. It went from stealing candy, to my things, to cash, and after that I asked them how much longer they would support him and call me “selfish” for “not sharing”. The line was finally crossed when he stole our grandmothers credit cards and her car.
She finally wrote him off.
This was AFTER he had stolen all of her jewelry, including the last present (anniversary ring) my grandfather was ever to give her.
Oh, but he tried to say that our family kicked him out because he’s gay. No. None of us cared about that, it was because he’s a thief.
His “friends” have bailed him out of jail and then dropped him when he steals from them.
But he claims the world is “just unfair” to him.
Now he tells his pity story and milks the “my family disowned me because I’m gay” to everyone he begs from. I learned this when he tried to do it to one of my friends.
The people who were tortured as a part of MK Ultra.
Imagine trying to convince the people around you that the government is trying to make you crazy with mind control, only years later to find out that not only was it true, but you wouldn’t get compensation for it. And you were subject to illegal human experimentation.
Jose Canseco. He revealed that a bunch of baseball players (Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, etc) were doing steroids.
No one believed him for years, until everyone else got caught doing steroids.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the only congressperson out of 535 members who voted no on the Authorized Use of Military Force Act after the 9/11 attacks (there were also 12 present/not voting recorded). In her words,
“It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk. The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack, and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action.”
For her vote she received death threats, a damaged political career, she was called insane, a traitor, and a communist. And she was 100% right.
Humanity sure would be a lot better off if we had listened to some of these folks early on, don’t you think?
What’s your favorite example of this phenomenon? Drop some knowledge on us in the comments!
The post These People All Turned Out to Be Right, NOT CRAZY appeared first on UberFacts.
I’ve always thought it was pretty interesting how car companies got their names – and Jerry Seinfeld’s bit on how car models are named is downright hilarious.
Some names are obvious – like Ford, for example, which is named after their founder – while others are a bit more elusive.
If this sort of semi-obscure knowledge is your thing, below are the origin stories behind the names of 11 popular car companies.
Image Credit: Dougw/English Wikipedia
Machinists and brothers, John and Horace Dodge ran a Michigan bicycle company in the 1890s.
They sold that business and began creating transmissions for Oldsmobile in 1902, then a year later, added Ford to their list of clients.
In 1913 they left those lucrative positions to start working on their own car designs, and the rest is obviously history.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Lexus is actually a Toyota brand, and when the company’s ad agency was looking for a name for the luxury division, they decided on Alexis.
It’s evolved into Lexus, and thank goodness – they would have had to compete with Alexa down the road.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Austrian entrepreneur Emil Jellinek had a secret love of racing cars. He drove Daimler cars in races all over Europe, typically using an alias when getting behind the wheel – Mercedes was his daughter’s name.
Three years in, Jellinek agreed to order more than 30 cars from Daimler to continue his passion, but made the condition that they be called Mercedes.
They agreed, and luxury brand was born.
Image Credit: Public Domain
In 1926, Sakichi Toyoda founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a company that made looms and not cars at all.
It was Toyoda’s son, Kiichiro, who started a separate motors division in 1933, and they quickly took off.
In 1936, during a competition designed to get the company a new logo, the winner was a design that included 3 Japanese characters that made up the Toyoda name.
The family gave it some thought, and decided that not only was “Toyota” stronger overall, the fact that it only required 8 brush strokes instead of 9 was considered lucky in their culture.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Volvo is Latin for “I roll,” and was conceived by Swedish ball bearing company SKF in 1915.
Because of the first World War, though, they didn’t start making cars until 1926.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
This is a tad unsavory, because the company was founded in 1937, during the rise of that unfortunate time.
It translates to “The People’s Car Company,” a reflection of the push to encourage German nationalism.
Image Credit: John Lloyd
Henry Leland, a New Yorker, founded the Cadillac Car Company in 1902, and the moniker is a nod to the history of automobiles itself.
Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, was the French explorer who founded Detroit in the early 18th century.
Image Credit: baku13
Like Ford, Honda bears the name of its founder, Soichiro Honda.
He was a mechanic who, in 1946, started Honda Motor Co. Ltd because he wanted to build small motorcycles.
He had a slow start but he didn’t give up, and by the 1960s owned one of the world’s largest bike companies.
In 1963 the made their first automobile, a Honda T360 pickup.
Image Credit: David Wright
Saab is an abbreviation of “Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolag,” which is quite a mouthful for anyone who isn’t Swedish (and maybe people who are).
It means “Swedish Airplane, Limited,” and obviously, the originally manufactured aircraft.
They produced their first automobiles in the 1940s.
Image Credit: Public Domain
David Dunbar Buick was a Scottish immigrant who got his start manufacturing enameled cast-iron bathtubs. He began toying with engines instead in the 1890s, and founded the Buick Manufacturing Company in 1902.
While his designs were fantastic, he had a timeliness issue that made it hard to earn customers. He always needed new investors, and made a bad call that resulted in his losing his company to William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors.
Buick was handed a pink slip at $100,000, and when he died in 1929, he was broke.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Don’t worry, though, because William Durant eventually got his. At least for awhile.
In 1910, his own creditors forced him out of his management role at GM, so he teamed up with Swiss race car driver Louis Chevrolet to found Chevrolet in 1911.
Durant earned enough to take back control of GM, and then in 1918, he acquired Chevy, too. Louis Chevrolet ended up back at Chevy, working as a consultant in his own company.
Some people have all the luck.
Well, color me surprised! I feel so much smarter now, how about you?
Which one of these surprised you the most? Tell us in the comments!
The post Learn About How 11 Famous Car Companies Got Their Names appeared first on UberFacts.
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