Category: Open Lines

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, 3-out-of-4 of all cooking pans in the nation where coated with his invention. …

On this date 101 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 …

Perhaps most people are now familiar with the data processing expression “garbage in — garbage out.” In these days of intensive search for alternative ways to generate power, the words have become “garbage in — energy out,” as a number of power plants burn garbage instead of fossil fuels. The first power plant in the U.S. to burn garbage was the Union Electric Company in St. Louis, Missouri, on this date in 1972. The U.S. now burns about 12 percent …

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 1st 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 became law on February 3, 1870. This milestone in civil rights 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 …

One of the most frightening industrial accidents in the U.S. occurred on this date in 1979 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant on the Susquehanna River, south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A cascade of alarms and emergency responses started when someone mistakenly cross connected air and water lines in the plant’s number two reactor. The plant reportedly came close to a hydrogen gas explosion and a meltdown of its uranium core, which would have caused extensive radiation contamination. The …

A triumph of mobile computing was achieved on this date in 1961. By our 21st century standards, this involved some truly heavy lifting. Rolling actually. 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 2012, nearly 122 million U.S. households — about 79 …

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 …

Ask many Americans where their food comes from, and they’ll answer the supermarket, while clothing comes from the mall. That’s why this is National Agriculture Week — an annual program focused 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 nearly 6.5 million farms in the U.S., and …

Today marks the birthday in 1899 of Dorothy Stratton, who left her position as Dean of Women at Purdue University in 1942 to take a commission in the Navy. Transferred to the Coast Guard, she organized and directed that service’s women’s reserve, which she named the SPARS. After the Second World War, Stratton was an official at the International Monetary Fund, and then was executive director of the Girl Scouts for 10 years. She died at the age of 107. …

Today marks the birthday in 1910 of one of the major figures of the American wine industry — Julio Gallo. When Prohibition ended, he and his brother Ernest started making wine in humble surroundings — a rented California warehouse, with equipment bought on credit. Over years of hard work saw their winery became the largest in the U.S., and their creative marketing techniques helped shape the nation’s drinking tastes. Now, the Gallo establishment is joined by some 1,950 other wineries …

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. But he was caught, convicted and spent five years in New York’s …

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 …

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 …

One of the most noted crime-fighting tools started because of a conversation at a card game between J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and a newspaper reporter. The reporter wanted to profile some of the most wanted criminals the FBI was searching for. The resulting article caused a sensation, leading to the publication of the first “Ten Most Wanted” list by the FBI on this date in 1950. In the years since, 500 men and women have appeared on the …

The first state college for women was created this month in 1884 in Mississippi. Known as the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College, classes opened in the fall of the next year on the campus of a former college in Columbus. Now called the Mississippi University for Women, it has been ranked as one of the top schools in the annual list of “America’s Best Colleges.” Now coed, the school has many of the buildings on its imposing campus on the …