Aspirin got its name in parts. The a came from the first letter of the product’s scientific name, acetylsalicylic acid.
The spir came from Spiraea ulmaria, the meadowsweet plant, which was the original source of the compound.
The in was a common suffix for medications in the late nineteenth century, when aspirin was first marketed.
Yes, there was really a Dr. Scholl. In the late nineteenth century, William (“Billy”) Scholl left farm life in La Porte, Indiana, for life as a shoemaker in Chicago. After noticing how much abuse the average foot takes, he decided to become a podiatrist and treat the problems he saw. Once established as a medical…
No, an airplane’s black box is not black, it is orange. Inside the box, a stainless-steel tape contains information on the airspeed, altitude, and vertical acceleration. A second orange box contains a tape of the last half-hour of conversation in the cockpit.
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…
The lion, developed before the formation of MGM, was the original trademark for the newly formed (Samuel) Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. It was the creation of a young advertising man named Howard Dietz, who was inspired by his alma mater Columbia University’s football song, “Roar, Lion, Roar!” Later on, Dietz also came up with the motto…
In 1942, the theoretical physicist John V. Atanasoff and his assistant Clifford Berry built the first computer that successfully used vacuum tubes to do mathematical calculations. The machine was called the Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC.
Robert Johnson, a pharmacist from Brooklyn, New York, and partner in a Brooklyn pharmaceutical supply firm invented the Band-Aid. They believed that individually sealed sterile bandages could drastically reduce the rate of hospital infections, which in some cases ran to 90 percent. By the mid-1800s, he and his brothers formed a pharmaceutical company that produced…