Category: Open Lines

The need to pay a $15 debt sparked one of the most useful of inventions, patented on this date in 1849. Walter Hunt, a mechanic in New York, owed the debt. While he thought about how to raise the money, he fiddled with a small piece of wire. Finally, he bent the wire with a twist in the middle, creating a spring, and formed a clasp at the other end, to guard the point of the wire. He had invented …

For much of history, a cooked meal was followed by the drudgery of scrubbing the pans used to prepare it. But something was discovered this week in 1938 that changed all that, a solidified refrigerant gas that we now know as Teflon. Developed by Roy Plunkett of the DuPont Company, slippery Teflon revolutionized cooking utensils in the 1960s. By the time he died in the early 1990s, most new cooking pans in the nation where coated with his invention. Today, …

On this date 102 years ago, the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified establishing direct popular election of senators. Previously, members of the Senate were elected by each state’s legislature. As the voting franchise expanded after the Civil War and into the Progressive Era, growing sentiment held that senators ought to be popularly elected in the same manner as representatives. In fact, because of such developments, at least 29 states by 1913 were nominating senators on a popular …

The years of Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, were considered a noble experiment that failed, as the subsequent crime associated with bootlegging caused problems worse than the lone problem of drunkenness. The crumbling of the unpopular Volstead Act accelerated on this date in 1933 when Congress amended the act to permit beer of 3.2 percent alcohol to be brewed and sold. The beer permitted earlier under Prohibition contained only .05 percent. Called “near beer,” and much disdained, one humorist declared …

On this date in 1859, Massachusetts established the first state milk inspection program. An inspector of milk was appointed in August that year, operating from Boston, and whose primary efforts were to suppress so-called “swill milk,” the poor, thin output of cows kept in unsanitary conditions and fed on distillery refuse. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration assists state and local dairy inspections. Every year, Americans consume an average of over 600 pounds of all manner of dairy products, including …

America’s coffee-loving public has no grounds for complaint about today’s anniversary. On this date in 1829, a patent was issued to James Carrington of Connecticut for a coffee mill. Milling is an ancient process for grinding grains and beans, and the basis of the 1829 patent was largely for its more robust, all-cast iron construction. But Carrington’s coffee mill came out to benefit from the country’s increasing taste for coffee, which supplanted tea as a favorite beverage around the time …

Critics of federal spending initiatives often allude with some disdain to the government’s ability to create money. It’s pure coincidence, though, that the first federal building commissioned under the country’s new constitution was intended to do just that. On this date in 1792, President George Washington and Congress established the National Mint in the then capital city of Philadelphia. The mint issued the gold, silver and copper coinage as the legal tender of the young republic. Since building the mint …

Broadcast advertising saw a major change on this date in 1970 as President Nixon signed a bill into law prohibiting cigarette advertising on the nation’s airwaves. The ban went into effect on January 1 of the following year — the first major step in the ongoing debate over the public health risk of smoking. Until then, names such as Lucky Strike, Chesterfield and Philip Morris had sponsored some of the most famous shows since the earliest days of broadcasting. In …

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution declared the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was ratified on February 3, 1870. The new, affirmed civil right was first exercised on this date that year, though in a decidedly minor electoral matter. Thomas Peterson-Mundy, a former slave, was the first African-American to exercise the franchise, casting a vote in favor …

FM radio is 74 years old. In March 1941, the first commercial FM station went on the air — W47NV in Nashville, Tennessee. FM —standing for frequency modulation — was first proposed in a scientific paper written by Edwin Armstrong in 1922. By 1934, he was demonstrating to network officials how FM was unaffected by static, like all the radio stations then on the air, which used AM, or amplitude modulation. World War II interrupted the advance of FM broadcasting, …

A triumph of mobile computing was achieved on this date in 1961. A division of the Sperry Rand Corporation equipped a trailer truck to haul a UNIVAC I computer from New York City down to North Carolina to process data for the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. The UNIVAC I, fully assembled, weighed in at a nimble 7,237 pounds. In 2013, nearly 84 percent of America’s 116 million households had computers. Even the country’s seniors participate heavily. Nearly two-thirds of senior households …

Everyone who loves convenience in shopping can thank Edward Delk and J.C. Nichols. It was they who conceived, designed, and built the first shopping mall in the U.S. The Country Club Plaza, on the outskirts of Kansas City, opened this month in 1923 to wide acclaim. It was the first shopping area to have stores facing inward toward a promenade, rather than facing out toward a road. The mall had 150 stores, a 2,000 seat auditorium, and parking for 5,500 …

Two young women, who were the first Americans of their gender to enter their professions, are highlighted during this Women’s History Month. Lucy Hobbs Taylor was the first to receive a degree in dentistry, graduating from the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in 1866. And this month in 1883, Susan Hayhurst became the nation’s first woman pharmacist when she graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. She’s further distinguished by obtaining that degree while already being a physician. Now there …

A number of various causes are recognized in March. Two of these seem to go hand in hand, or hand to mouth — National Nutrition Month and National Frozen Food Month. The goal of the first is make consumers aware of just how easy it is to eat healthy meals. And one of the ways this is possible is because of frozen food. Developed by Clarence Birdseye, the first commercially available items were quick-frozen fish fillets in 1925. Frozen food …

The ingenuity of one man helped to change the very shape of America’s cities — and indeed those around the world. On this date in 1857 in New York City, Elisha Otis installed the first enclosed, commercial passenger elevator. His earlier development of automatic brakes meant that riders were safe, even if the hoisting cable of an elevator broke. Subsequent installations have lifted city skylines, as architects began to design increasingly taller buildings. And reversing centuries of practice, the elevator …

One of the most distinctive and near universal American colloquialisms — the affirmation “OK” — appeared in public for the first time this month in 1839. There have been claims that “OK” derives from languages as diverse as Greek and Choctaw, and that it appeared in earlier American documents. But it was first published in a Boston Morning Post story with a brief definition. While “OK” took off around the country and eventually the world, time KO’d the Boston Post, …

Banks had operated in America for about a half century before someone tried to make an unauthorized withdrawal. On this date in 1831, Edward Smith committed the first bank robbery in the U.S. — hitting the City Bank on New York’s Wall Street. He entered the bank after it closed, using a duplicate set of keys, and got away with $245,000 — a huge sum at the time. By various calculations, that would be worth from $5.4 million to $6.6 …

Ask many Americans where their food comes from, and they’ll answer the supermarket, while clothing comes from the mall. That’s why today is National Agriculture Day, with a further National Agriculture Week starting this Sunday. These annual programs focus on students across the nation, the consumers of tomorrow. They’ll learn that from pizzas to cosmetics, from clothing to orange juice, agriculture gives us what we eat each day and much of what we wear and use. In 1920, there were …

  VANCE COUNTY SCHOOLS     WEEKLY SCHOOL NEWS     Volume 3, Issue 29 A Publication for Middle and High Schools March 16-20, 2015       The MISSION of Vance County Schools is to be committed to educating all students to prepare them for lifelong learning and productive citizenship.   IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS     ?   The deadline for fifth-grade students to complete applications for enrollment as sixth   graders in the STEM Early High School for the …

This is a day when people of all ethnicities are cheerfully encouraged to wear something green. It is St. Patrick’s Day, a rare national holiday observed outside its native land. The day honors Bishop Patrick, born in England, who brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, using a shamrock to illustrate divinity. The celebration here goes back to Colonial times. New York City’s parade has taken place every year since 1762, and today is the largest such event in …