Friday / Weekend Open Lines


An innovation in product packaging — and a staple of TV advertising — is having its 80th anniversary tomorrow. The first canned beer went on sale in 1935 as a marketing test in Richmond, Virginia, by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey. Experiments with putting beer in cans had taken place as early as 1909 but the technology of the time couldn’t stop the beer from interacting negatively with the metal of the can. Prohibition delayed further development. By the late 1960s, canned beer sales exceeded that for bottled beer. There are 869 breweries in the U.S., employing over 26,000 people in a $28 billion per year craft. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the ‘America’s Economy’ mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.

Sunday, January 25th. On this date in 1915, east and west were linked by voice in the first transcontinental phone call. This event was a conference call involving Alexander Graham Bell in New York, his assistant Thomas Watson in San Francisco, President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, and the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in Georgia. Using the new commercial service was a major financial commitment. The charge for a three-minute call from New York to San Francisco started at $20.70. That’s over $486 today. Over 97 percent of America’s households have phone service. Landline and cellular services combined cost these households an average of $1,270 per year. The cellular service cost alone is over $900. Profile America is in its18th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Saturday, January 24th. An accidental discovery at a construction site on this date in 1848 changed the course of U.S. history. James Marshall was building a sawmill for his boss, John Sutter, near Coloma, California, when he found gold. The pair tried to keep the discovery secret, but word got out, and by the following year, the famous Gold Rush was on, drawing some 100,000 fortune-seekers to the California territory. About $2 billion of gold was mined during the rush, which spurred construction of railroads and hastened statehood for California. While the 49er image is long gone, about 12,000 workers at 126 establishments in the U.S. still make their living mining gold and silver ore, extracting more than $16 billion worth of the precious metals from the ground every year. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.