A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Nash as the Greatest Car in the World, but not the Greatest Nash

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 363        
000-ebay--Nov 8 nash031

 Nash / Lafayette  Motor Car Company exhibited nine of their cars in a tower o f plate glass at the “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933/4.  The brilliantly colored cars (I guess we don’t think of them as such if we are younger than 80 and have only seen these automobiles in black and white movies) must have looked spectacular in their glass enclosure, a sight probably not too many people had ever seen before.

000-ebay--Nov 8 nash030

 

The real feature for me though in this little post-card like publication was the interior image of the Twin Ignition Nash (1934 model) that, for some reason or other, was depicted as an enormous, invasion-from-outer-space sized car better than 200 feet long.

Nash In any event, it is a delightful image, and by god’s baggy pants, the Nash was a beautiful car.  But it wasn’t the most beautiful or the most impressive in the panoply of sui generis Nashs:  that I do believe belongs to John Forbes Nash, the 1994 Nobel Laureate (economics, and no offense intended to Charles W. Nash), mathematical genius and schizophrenic and best popularly known as the mind in Sylvia Nasser’s A Beautiful Mind (and by the four-time Oscar winning movie of the same name). 

000-ebay--Nov 8 nash032


 

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories