In the Middle Ages, people stored money in a “pygg jar,” made of a clay called pygg.
By the eighteenth century in England, the name and shape of the receptacle had evolved to “pig bank”, and from there to piggy bank.
Chamois is a soft, warm leather and is the skin of the Alpine animal of the same name. More often, however, it is specially treated sheepskin.
What we now know as the inch (from Latin uncia, or “12th part”) was defined as 112 foot by the Romans. It was roughly a thumb’s breadth, while a foot was roughly the length of a human foot. The Romans introduced the inch to Britain, where it was incorporated into the English system of weights…
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…
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.
LSMFT means Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. It was the creation of George Washington Hill, son of Buck Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. The slogan, introduced in the early 1940s, became so popular that by 1944 its acronym, L.S.M.F.T., was printed on the bottom of every Lucky Strike package.
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…