Du Pont chemist Wallace Hume Carrothers invented the artificial polymer nylon in the 1930s while searching for alternatives to silk.
Nylon stockings first came on the market with heavy publicity on what was billed as “Nylon Day,” May 15, 1940.
Women hungry for a cheap and durable alternative to silk stockings bought millions of pairs by the end of the year.
Technically, the first president of the United States was not George Washington, but John Hanson of Maryland. In 1781, Hanson began a one-year term as the first “president of the United States in Congress assembled” under the Articles of Confederation. Seven other men served as president before Washington, technically, the ninth president, took office in…
A veteran of Vietnam and Grenada and head of the U.S. Central Command, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf had been revising contingency plans for war in the Mideast when Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Having just completed a command-post exercise with Iraq as the mock enemy, Schwarzkopf was prepared to take charge of the…
Most of the employees in the early years of the Boston Manufacturing Company, which was one of the first American cloth factories, were young, unmarried women. Founded at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814 by Francis Cabot Lowell, the company ran the first American factories to produce both yarn and finished textiles. Its employees were daughters of…
President Lyndon Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to fill the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by Thomas C. Clark, who resigned when his son, Ramsey Clark, was appointed as U.S. Attorney General. Marshall (190892), a noted civil rights lawyer, became the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
Yes, an airplane has indeed crashed into the Empire State Building. On July 28, 1945, a U.S. Army bomber crashed into the New York landmark, killing 13.
Seoul was occupied by the North Koreans twice during the Korean War. The capital of South Korea fell to invaders from North Korea in June 1950, inciting President Harry Truman to commit American troops as part of United Nations forces sent to repel the invasion. U.N. forces recaptured Seoul on September 26, only to be…