Category: Quick hits

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, …

On this date in 1892, the first U.S. patent for a truly portable typewriter was issued to George C. Blickensderfer of Stamford, Connecticut for a “type writing machine.” The machine worked on the principle of a revolving type wheel, a precursor to the type ball of 1970s typewriters. The wheel reduced the number of moving parts from 2,500 to 250, improving reliability and reducing the weight by one-fourth. The Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company eventually became one of the world’s largest typewriter …

Forty-five years ago today, the Civil Rights Act became law. At the ceremony, President Johnson said: “The proudest moments of my presidency have been times such as this when I have signed into law the promises of a century.” The event occurred one week to the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Among its provisions, the act protected civil rights workers, expanded the rights of American Indians, and established measures to end discrimination in housing. At the …

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 one century 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, as a result of such developments, at least 29 states were nominating senators on a popular …

One of the most desirable cars in automobile showrooms across the U.S. in 1954 was the Packard. The new models were the first to be equipped with a feature that soon swept the industry–the tubeless tire. The idea had been patented more than 50 years earlier by Goodyear, but had never been developed for sale. So for many decades, cars rode on tires containing an inner tube to hold the air. The air-filled or pneumatic tire was conceived by a …

Many people who use computers regularly will recognize the saying “garbage in — garbage out.” In these days of intensive search for alternative ways to create 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 day in 1972. The U.S. now burns about 14 percent of …