Category: Quick hits

Immigration and assimilation are matters of much current debate, but in 1980, those issues came floating in on the tide. It was on this date that what’s known as the Mariel boatlift began. When Cuban ruler Fidel Castro announced that any citizens wishing to leave the police state could, the voluntary exiles made their way to the port town of Mariel, just west of Havana. During the exodus, some 125,000 Cubans crossed the Florida straits in about 5,000 small boats, …

For urban dwellers, the difficulty — or at least the expense — of doing their laundry began to ease on this date in 1934 when the first public, self-operated laundry in the U.S. opened its doors in Fort Worth, Texas. The first name was “Washateria,” eventually replaced with the now familiar “Laundromat.” Early facilities were not necessarily coin-operated, and there was always an attendant on duty. The automatic washing machine came along in 1937, and by the late 1940s, the …

April is a significant month for the American printed word. In 1800, the Library of Congress was founded, and earlier this week, in 1828, Noah Webster published the first dictionary of American English. This is also the fifth day of National Library Week, celebrating libraries, those who staff them and the billions of materials they circulate. While computers and electronic media are of increasing importance in the services libraries offer, books remain at the core of their collections, with the …

Children have worked throughout history, especially on family farms and in trades. But their employment in industrialized settings raised many popular objections. On this date in 1836, Massachusetts became the first state to prohibit children under 15 from working in factories. Massachusetts acted again six years later, limiting children’s work to 10 hours per day. But it wasn’t until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that long, dangerous child labor was ended nationally. The restrictions on child labor scarcely …

To borrow from some recent advertising slogans, although many Americans couldn’t imagine leaving home without them, and they’re everywhere they want to be, there was a time when credit cards were rare; issued only by individual merchants. But that proprietary limitation ended on this date in 1952, when the Franklin National Bank in New York launched a credit card for use by the customers of varied merchants. In this, the bank was following the lead of the Diners Club Card, …

The distribution of political representation under the Constitution was authorized on this date in 1792. Based on the results of the 1790 Census, the House of Representatives was to be apportioned according to population, coming as near to equal populations in the districts as could be determined. That first census counted a resident population of over 3.9 million people in the soon to be 15 states. There were then 105 seats in the House of Representatives, and the Apportionment Act …

This week in 1955, a small hamburger restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois-the first of what would become one of the world’s best-recognized brand names — McDonald’s. The franchise shop belonged Ray Kroc, whose main interest at the time was selling the machines that mixed milkshakes. The name came from two McDonald brothers who operated a hamburger shop in California. The first day’s revenue at the Illinois franchise was $366 and 12 cents. That shop is now a museum housing …

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, 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 …