A New York City retailer, Wekselbaum ran his store by two tenets. “One thing he told me on various occasions was that throughout his life he often felt like something of an outsider,” his son Charles said. “In Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, he was called a Jewish person; in Havana, a campesino[peasant]; and in New York, a … Read more
From This is True for 14 October 2018
Knowing Emerick was fascinated by records (ever since finding his grandmother’s stack of Gramophone disks when he was 6), a schoolteacher told him about a job opening at a nearby recording studio. The boy — he was just 15 — jumped on it, and got the job. On his second day at work, a virtually … Read more
From This is True for 7 October 2018
Born in Lithuania, much of Shachnow’s extended family was grabbed by the Nazis when he was 6, and sent to the Kovno concentration camp. He was forced to watch as most of his family was killed, and survived by volunteering for heavy labor. Apparently with the help of his mother, Shachnow, who had just turned … Read more
From This is True for 30 September 2018
Born in China, Kao went to school in Hong Kong, then moved to Britain for graduate school, earning his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of London. While still in school, he worked at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England. He was assigned to figure out why optical communications waveguides didn’t work well. … Read more
From This is True for 23 September 2018
Born Ladislav Bittman in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Martin-Bittman was an intelligence officer in the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service. His specialty: disinformation, in large part helping the Soviet Union’s cold war fight against the United States. Not just the obvious, like setting up brothels to snare western politicians in compromising photos, but also much more sophisticated ploys, like … Read more
From This is True for 23 September 2018
An entrepreneur, in 1966 Blay co-founded Stereodyne, a company to duplicate 8-track tapes, and then cassettes, for the booming home and car stereo market. In 1969, he started Magnetic Video Corporation to capitalize on the corporate use of reel-to-reel video tapes, duplicating those, too. As he looked for ways to expand that business, he learned … Read more
From This is True for 16 September 2018
As a geologist, Hauri studied rocks; it’s where the rocks were that is the interesting part. A researcher at Washington D.C.’s Carnegie Institution for Science for 24 years, Hauri challenged the assumption that the moon is “bone dry” — as thought for decades. Samples of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts had only minute traces of … Read more
From This is True for 9 September 2018
Born in Trinidad, Elliot Mannette was captivated by street musicians, pounding out rhythms on anything they could find, such as trash cans, biscuit tins, and paint buckets. Players started hammering the metal from below to raise a hump, and with that they could start getting musical notes. Mannette was fascinated, and started working with metal … Read more
From This is True for 2 September 2018
An artist, Heath liked drawing from when he was a young boy, and by the time he was in high school, he had freelance gigs to draw for comic books (Captain Aero Comics, 1942-1944). A stint in the Army gave him an even greater appreciation for detail, and once he was out and drawing full time, … Read more
From This is True for 26 August 2018
After earning his Master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1943, Everett joined the staff of the university’s Servomechanisms Laboratory, where he worked with fellow grad student Jay Forrester. In 1944 they got a contract from the U.S. Navy. The job: develop a “universal” flight trainer and aircraft simulator. That wasn’t easy at the … Read more
From This is True for 19 August 2018