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.
Alfred Carl Fuller came to the United States from Norway in 1903, and after working at a variety of jobs, he began selling brushes door-to-door in 1905. By 1910, he had a staff of 25 salesmen. Over the years, Fuller adapted by expanding his line to include a variety of household cleaning products. When he…
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.
Henry Shrapnel of England (1761-1842), an artillery officer, invented the so-called shrapnel. It was a round projectile filled with bullets and equipped with an explosive charge to scatter the shot. In later versions, fragments of the shell casing itself were found to be more deadly than the enclosed bullets. Shrapnel today refers to those fragments.
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…
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.
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.