What does Ouija in Ouija board mean?
The Ouija board is thought to reveal unconscious thoughts and emotions.
It is named for the French and German words for yes, oui and ja.
The Ouija board is thought to reveal unconscious thoughts and emotions.
It is named for the French and German words for yes, oui and ja.
Originally San Francisco tailor Levi Strauss made jeans from canvas. But in the early 1860s, he started using a softer fabric imported from Nimes, France. Known in French as serge de Nimes, the material was called denim in the United States.
According to George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, the name is his invention: “I knew a trade name must be short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelled . . . and in order to satisfy trademark laws, it must mean nothing. . . . The letter k had been a favorite with me, it seemed a…
Scottish engineer John Baird built a working color television in 1928. But it was Hungarian-American inventor Peter Carl Goldmark who, in 1940, developed the first color-television system to be used commercially. Goldmark is also remembered for inventing the 33 1/3 RPM long-playing record in 1948.
The safety pin as we know it today was not produced until 1849, when American inventor Walter Hunt patented the first modern design. Precursors were developed in Europe about 3,000 years ago and became the standard device for fastening clothes. In the sixth century B.c., Greek and Roman women used a fibula, a pin with…
The idea for Alka-Seltzer came from a newspaper editor in Elkhart, Indiana, in the 1920s. It was brought to the public by Hub Beardsley, president of the Dr. Miles Laboratories (now Miles Laboratories). Beardsley learned that an entire newspaper staff had remained free of influenza during an epidemic when they took the editor’s prescription of…
Developed in 1914 by George Bunting, a Baltimore pharmacist, the skin cream Noxzema was originally called Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy. He searched in vain for a better name until one day a customer entered his drugstore and told him, “Your sunburn cream sure knocked out my eczema.” The concoction that “knocks eczema” became Noxzema.