Category: Open Lines

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 next 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. …

While openings of a major department store or a branch of a big-box chain are often welcomed by shoppers and communities, they are also the cause of some concern. Small local businesses face greater competition, yet those small businesses are an outsized engine of economic growth. Additionally, they are important distinguishing features in local communities. That’s why today is Mom and Pop Business Owners Day. There are about 27.1 million business firms in the U.S., but over 21 million of …

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 2010, nearly 92 million U.S. households — about 77 …

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 inwards 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 …

One of the most distinctive and near universal American colloquialisms — the affirmation “OK” — appeared in public for the first time this week 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, …

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting, and firing. While this act is a famous landmark in the national effort to assure equality of treatment, its ban on sex discrimination was not in the forefront of the effort. On this date in 1872, the state of Illinois enacted the first such ban on discrimination. It came about through the lobbying of America’s first female law school graduate, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

On this date in 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Hawaii Statehood Bill that passed through Congress the week before. In a plebiscite held in June, Hawaiian voters validated the federal act, opting for statehood by more than 94 percent of the vote. On August 21st, Hawaii became the 50th state, and our current national flag debuted. Hawaii was annexed by the United States in July 1898 and was organized as a territory two years later. In the 1900 Census, …

A number of various causes are recognized in March. Two of these seem to go hand-in-hand — 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 frozen food was fish in 1925. Frozen food became increasingly popular as refrigerated freight trains …

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 this week in 1950. In the years since, 497 men and women have appeared on the list. …

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 …

One of the most famous department stores in America opened in Philadelphia on this date in 1877. Wanamaker’s, now absorbed into the Macy’s family of department stores, opened in a converted train station and is now a national historic landmark. The store was among the first in the country to make the experience of shopping as much a draw as the merchandise itself, pioneered the use of the price tag, and was the first to install a restaurant on the …

One of the most devastating public health crises in history hit the U.S. on this date 95 years ago — and experts are still studying it, hoping to head off a similar global pandemic. The first cases were reported among soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas. By October, the worst month, 195,000 Americans perished. By 1920, nearly one-in-four Americans had suffered from this strain of the flu, killing about 575,000. Worldwide, estimates put the death toll between 30 to 50 million. …

The inventor of the first practical automatic dishwasher was born on this date in 1839 and was perhaps an unlikely candidate for the distinction. Josephine Cochrane was a socialite and devised the dishwasher out of some annoyance at how her domestic staff damaged her china. Awarded a patent in 1886, Cochrane sold her machines in the 1890s mainly to restaurants and hotels. Her company eventually became KitchenAid, now part of the Whirlpool Corporation. In 2011, the Census Bureau’s American Housing …

As if to prove there is nothing new under the sun, Massachusetts acted on this date in far-off 1801 to register voters. At that time, the franchise was limited to men — usually those of some property and local repute. Town assessors drew up publicly-posted lists of voters. If any voter was omitted, documents proving eligibility were accepted. The practice caught on very slowly. Only after the Civil War did voter registration become widespread. Today, North Dakota is the only …