Adolf Hitler (fourth from left) at the Volkswagen factory, 1938. 

Adolf Hitler (center) looks at a model of the Volkswagen car with the designer (left).

On this day in 1937, the government of Germany–then under the control of
Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party, formed a new state-owned automobile company,
Volkswagenwerk, or “The People’s Car Company.”

Originally operated by the German Labor Front,  Volkswagen had its head
office in Wolfsburg, Germany. In addition to his ambitious campaign to build 
a network of autobahns and limited access highways across Germany, Hitler’s
pet project was the development and mass production of an affordable yet still speedy vehicle that could sell for less than 1,000 Reich marks (about $140 at
the time). To provide the design for this “people’s car,” Hitler called in the
Austrian automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche.  However, soon after the
car was displayed for the first time at the Berlin Motor Show in 1939, World
War II began, and Volkswagen halted production. Volkswagen sales in the
United States were initially slower than in other parts of the world, due to the
car’s historic Nazi connections.

In 1959, the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach launched a landmark campaign, dubbing the car the “Beetle.” Over the next several years, VW
became the top-selling auto import in the United States. In 1960, the German government sold 60 percent of  Volkswagen’s stock to the public. The last
original Beetle rolled off the line in Puebla, Mexico, on July 30, 2003 (below).
(from HISTORY and A+E Networks)

    
    
   

MIKE GRACIA

Sir Elton Hercules John (Reginald Kenneth Dwight) is 72.

Rock and roll legend Elton John has sold over 250 million albums in a career
that’s spanned over 50 years. He is best known for such hit songs as "Rocket
Man," "Tiny Dancer," "Bennie and the Jets" and "Candle in the Wind."Elton
began playing the piano at age three and won a junior scholarship to the
Royal Academy of Music.

ED DANAHUE

It was on this day in 1975.

On this day in 1965, U.S. President Johnson (center) signed into law Social Security Act that established Medicare and Medicaid. It went
into effect the following year. Former President Harry S. Truman
is seated on the right. 

A photo of Truman’s application form.

Black Tom pier shortly after the explosion.

The Black Tom explosion on July 30, 1916, in Jersey City, New Jersey, was an
act of sabotage by German agents to destroy American-made munitions that
were to be supplied to the Allies in World War I.

The USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on
this day in 1945. The ship had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian. Only 316 out
of 1,196 men aboard survived the attack.

An artists illustration of the attack on The USS Indianapolis.

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947)

Henry Ford was an American industrialist and a business
magnate, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the
sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique
of mass production.

Henry Ford with a Model T in Buffalo, New York, in 1921.

Actor Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is 71 years old today.

Bodybuilder, actor, and politician who served as the governor of California
from 2003 to 2011. His best known films include Conan the Barbarian (1982) 
Predator (1987) The Terminator series (beginning in 1984) and Total Recall
(1990). In 1996 he portrayed Howard Langston in the holiday comedy film 
Jingle All the Way.

                
                   1994

Workers at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, assemble the
first Corvette, a two-seater sports car that would become an
American icon. The first completed production car rolled off
the assembly line two days later (below), one of just 300
Corvettes made that year.

(History) – The last Packard–the classic American luxury car with the
famously enigmatic slogan “Ask the Man Who Owns One”–rolls off
the production line at Packard’s plant in Detroit, Michigan on this
day in 1956.

Mechanical engineer James Ward Packard and his brother, William
Dowd Packard, built their first automobile, a buggy-type vehicle with
a single cylinder engine, in Warren, Ohio in 1899 (below).