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Wisconsin Originals: Les Paul of Waukesha helped make Rock & Roll what it is today

From The Journal Times.com:

BARRY ADAMS

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we're recognizing Wisconsinites who have made unique contributions to the nation. 

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Les Paul’s home-spun inventions elevated him to a peer group that includes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison.

It was Paul, nicknamed “The Wizard of Waukesha,” who helped make the sound of American Rock 'n Roll possible with his solid-body electric guitars and the recording practices he invented like overdubbing and multi-track recording.

His Gibson Les Paul Custom guitars have been favored over the years by the likes of Jimmy Page of Led Zepplin, Duane Allmen of the Allmen Brothers Band and Randy Rhoads of Black Sabbath.

Paul, also a celebrated jazz musician, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and, in 2007, two years before his death, was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the U.S. government.

Les Paul, known for his innovations on the solid body electric guitar and in multitrack recording, was born in Waukesha.

RICHARD DREW

Born Lester Polsfuss in 1915, Paul created his first electric guitar when he was a teenager by cobbling together parts from his parents’ record player. Paul dropped out of high school to join the Wolverton’s Radio Band on KMOX in St. Louis, Missouri, and by 1934 was in Chicago playing both country-western and jazz. He would later form a trio that played backup for Nat King Cole and the Andrew Sisters.

In 1941, Paul designed and built one of the first solid-body electric guitars. That led to a deal in the 1950s with the Gibson Guitar Company, which would go on to produce a guitar according to Paul’s specifications.

Paul won a Grammy in 1977 for the album “Chester and Lester,” a collection of pop-jazz guitar duets recorded with his old friend Chet Atkins.

Discovery World Museum in Milwaukee has a permanent exhibit dedicated to Paul as does the Waukesha County Historical Society & Museum. There are a series of murals throughout Waukesha honoring Paul’s life while his grave at Prairie Home Cemetery in Waukesha features a large monument with a guitar.

From: https://journaltimes.com/news/local/history/article_ed088d44-c492-563d-9842-a980f34dd081.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

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The Incredible Story of the US Army's Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains

Click image to enlarge

You need to get 500 tons of supplies from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Arctic Ocean—a journey of about 400 miles through pure wilderness. There are no roads, very few airstrips, and endless ice. You're going to have to withstand minus 68 degree temperatures. Also, nuclear armageddon is on the menu if you're not quick about it.

You, my friend, need a LeTourneau land train. 

The DEW Line

By 1954, with the Cold War well underway, the U.S. government realized the quickest way to get a nuclear bomber from Russia to America was to go right over the Arctic Circle. If we wanted any chance of preventing a nuclear apocalypse, we needed to know if Soviet bombers were crossing the North Pole as soon as possible. The Army planned to build 63 manned radar stations in the high Arctic around the 69th parallel (200 miles north of the Arctic circle) as a result. And to transport all the necessary material that far north, it would have to get creative. 

IKIMEDIA

The DEW Line

Working together, Canadian and American governments determined they would need about 500 tons of materials to construct all of these outposts. With no suitable runways or ports and heavy lift helicopters still in their infancy, it would all have to be hauled in over land. The task of figuring out how exactly to get that done fell to the same company that had been chosen to build the stations themselves—The Western Electric Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.

Solving unsolvable logistics issues wasn't exactly its forte. But with the help of TRADCOM (U.S. Army Transportation Research and Development Command), it found the one company—more accurately, the one man—that might be able to help.

That's R. G. LeTourneau To You

Born in 1888, Robert Gilmore LeTourneau was an inventor of heavy machinery. In WWII, 70 percent of the Allies' earthmoving equipment was created by LeTourneau Technologies, Inc. Having very little formal education, LeTourneau began his working career as an ironmonger. By the time he died in 1969 he was tremendously wealthy and personally held nearly 300 patents. He is buried on the campus of the University he founded in his name, where his gravestone reads "MOVER OF MEN AND MOUNTAINS." Just a little character development for you.

LeTourneau had spent the early 1950s perfecting a sort of diesel-electric drivetrain for multi-wheeled heavy-machinery. The system—somewhat similar in concept to the sort used on many locomotives—used a combustion engine to spin an electric generator. This generator would send its power to hub motors mounted to each wheel of the vehicle, allowing for multi-wheel-drive without differentials, driveshafts, or the drivetrain losses associated with them. 

This powertrain setup will sound familiar to anyone who read our story on the doomed Antarctic Snow Cruiser earlier this month. But LeTourneau's design was clearly a generation ahead of Thomas Poulter's hub motors, which weren't geared properly to handle anything beyond a gentle incline.

ETOURNEAU TECHNOLOGIES INC.

The hub motor system

The VC-12 Tournatrain

LeTourneau originally applied this technology to scrapers and graders, but realizing the scalability of such a system, he soon moved beyond just earthmoving. In 1953, he dreamed up the first trackless land train to assist logging operations, the VC-12—a four-wheeled control cab with a 500-horsepower Cummins diesel connected to a generator, pulling three cargo trailers on giant, rugged tires, all of which were powered by hub motors to make it a true 16-wheel-drive vehicle. It was brutally ugly, but critically, it worked.

Developed to haul lumber out of forests over rough terrain, the VC-12 had a hauling capacity of 140 tons. A second version saw LeTourneau add three more cargo trailers and another control cab out back with a second Cummins diesel, much like a real train would be set up with multiple locomotives. TRADCOM caught wind of the project and asked for a demonstration.

TRADCOM came away impressed. This would be the vehicle to help engineers build up the DEW Line, or at least a version of it. The government decided to pay for the construction of a prototype control cabin built by LeTourneau and designed specifically for Arctic conditions. The result? The TC-264 Sno-Buggy—and, incidentally, monster trucks.

Read and see more: https://www.thedrive.com/news/33645/the-incredible-story-of-the-us-armys-earth-shaking-off-road-land-trains?utm_source=pocket-newtab

"Damn, somebody’s gonna get rich".

From Knuckledraggin My Life Away:

"Posted on 09/21/2015 by Wirecutter"

"Posted in Videos | 9 Comments"

 

 http://knuckledraggin.com/2015/09/damn-somebodys-gonna-get-rich/

As someone who has done his share of moving refrigerators, file cabinets, and stacks of boxes, I give this gadget 5 out of 5 stars.

A True Rube Goldberg

I needed a food dehydrator so I invented one.

List of equipment use...

1 - panel fan used for cooling electrical panel in machinery
2 - bamboo skewers
1 - 1 gallon ice cream pail
1 - thingie you use to put hot pans on
     so not to burn your counter top

Cut a hole in the bottom of the pail for the fan
Poke 4 holes for the skewers to support the thingie
Cut some holes in the top lid of the pail for vents