Friday / Weekend Open Line


If you shop the cereal aisle in your supermarket, you’ll see dozens of brands on display, from the sugary and candy-like to high-fiber organic products. One of them has been available for well over 100 years. It was on this date in 1893 that a Denver restaurant owner, Henry Perky, received a patent for the creation shredded wheat. By 1901, he had set up an ultra-modern plant at Niagara Falls, called “the Palace of Light,” to make shredded wheat, and the falls became the familiar logo of the cereal, which continues as a Nabisco product. In the U.S. today, there are 217 breakfast cereal manufacturing establishments, which combined gross over $22 billion in annual sales. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the America’s Economy mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.

Saturday, August 2nd. One of the engines of business and personal life in the 21st century is just 23 years old this month — the World Wide Web. The concept was developed and released by two scientists at the Cern Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. At 23, the Web is quite a bit younger than the U.S. median age of 37, but in its brief life has come to shape our days with searches, shopping and communication. It took some time to get going, though: In 1997, there were just a million sites on the global network. But by 2003, that number reached 3 billion. About 75 percent of households in the U.S. have Internet access at home, which takes in some 95 percent of all homes with computers. Over a quarter of Americans over the age of 3 have multiple avenues and devices to connect to the Web. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau, online at https://www.census.gov

Sunday, August 3rd. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Poet Emma Lazarus composed those words in 1883 to help raise funds for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. But on this date just a year earlier, Congress enacted one of the first immigration limitations in our history. The law barred entry to people thought likely to become what is called a “public charge,” or burden on society. Immigration laws have been much revised since 1882 and remain a topic of great political contention to this day. But the U.S. has for some time accepted more immigrants than any other nation. Of the roughly 309 million residents counted in the 2010 Census of Population, nearly 40 million were foreign-born and another 40 million were naturalized citizens or noncitizen immigrants. Profile America is in its 17th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.