Friday / Weekend Open Lines


Friday, January 15th. The contemporary habit of adjusting TV viewing to your own convenience got its sputtering start 50 years ago. The Sony Corporation began marketing its open-reel videotape recorder in 1966 to individual consumers. The black and white system didn’t make much of an impression. But the Japanese company did far better in 1975 with the introduction of the Betamax VCR for home recording and playback. Although Betamax quickly lost out in the market to the competing VHS format, it has survived up to now. Sony will stop making Betamax cassettes in March. From early open-reel recorders through VCRs to today’s DVD players and digital recorders, about 91 percent of America’s households have units to manage their TV viewing. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.

Saturday, January 16th. There have been 27 ratified amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 224-plus years, but that total comes with an asterisk. Uniquely, the 21st Amendment repeals the 18th, which began its short career this day in 1919. That amendment launched the Prohibition Era, a well-intentioned act of social hygiene, seeking to ban the availability of alcoholic beverages. The unintended consequences, though, were perhaps worse — vast flouting of the law by the public and a boost to organized crime. Prohibition was repealed in December 1933. In the no-longer-dry U.S., there are over 330 distilleries and 1,560 breweries, with combined annual sales of about $46.5 billion per year. Profile Americais in its19th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Sunday, January 17th. There’s been a lot of emphasis lately on making houses that are more energy efficient — with better insulation and windows that seal out heat and cold. Many feature the use of solar panels to capture the natural heat of the sun. The first house in America with solar heating and radiation cooling opened this week in 1955 in Tucson, Arizona. A large, slanting slab of steel and glass converted sunlight into heat, which was ducted into the house. In America’s 117 million occupied housing units, gas remains the most common heating fuel, outpacing electricity — about 57 million to 44 million. Solar energy is the power source for just under 83,000 homes in the U.S., or a bit over point-seven percent of the total. You can find more facts about America’s people, places and economy, from the American Community Survey, at <www.census.gov>.