History
Expansion chambers were invented and successfully manufactured by Limbach, a German engineer, in 1938, to economize fuel in two stroke engines. Germany was running short of petrol, which was at that stage produced using coal and sewerage transformation. An unexpected bonus was that the two stroke engines using tuned exhausts produced far more power than if running with a normal silencer. After the end of the second world war, some time passed before the concept was re-developed by East German Walter Kaaden during the cold war. They first appeared in the west on Japanese motorcycles after East German motorcycle racer Ernst Degner defected to the west while racing for MZ in the 1961 Swedish Grand Prix. He hid the blueprints under his racing leathers and defected during the race by riding off the track and claiming asylum. He did not finish the race. He later provided the blueprints to Japan's Suzuki.
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“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
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“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
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