We take many everyday items for granted, but when they were introduced, they were anything but ordinary.
Somewhere between necessity being the mother of invention and pure creative genius, all kinds of useful products have come into our lives. Were their creators inspired by a desire to get rich? Did they have years of schooling or technical training? Were they part of huge corporations with unlimited budgets?
No.
They just let their creativity take over. And we benefit from their inventive ways.
Josephine Dickson, an inexperienced cook, often burned and cut herself back in 1920. Her husband Earle Dickson was a Johnson & Johnson employee and got plenty of practice in hand bandaging. Out of concern for his wife's safety, he began to prepare bandages ahead of time. By combining a piece of surgical tape and a piece of gauze, he fashioned the first crude adhesive-strip bandage.
At 15 years old, Chester Greenwood's head was cold one December day in 1873. To protect his ears while ice skating, he found a piece of wire, and with his grandmother's help, padded the ends. In the beginning, his friends laughed at him. However, when they realized he was able to stay outside skating long after they had gone inside, freezing, they stopped laughing. Instead, they began to ask Chester to make ear covers for them, too.
During the hot summer of 1912, Clarence Crane, a chocolate manufacturer, was facing a dilemma. When he tried to ship his chocolates to candy shops in other cities, they melted. His customers didn't want to deal with the mess and deferred their orders until cooler weather. Crane needed to find a substitute for the melted chocolates if he wanted to keep his customers. He experimented with hard candy, which wouldn't melt. Using a machine designed for making medicinal pills, Crane produced small, circular candies with a hole in the middle. Life Savers were born.
The term "Frisbee" did not always refer to the flying plastic disks. More than 100 years ago, in Bridgeport, Conn., William Russell Frisbie owned the Frisbie Pie Company and delivered his pies locally. All of his pies were baked in the same type of 10-inch round tin with a raised edge, wide brim and "Frisbie's Pies" embossed on the bottom. Playing catch with the tins soon became a popular local sport. However, the tins were slightly dangerous when a toss was missed. It became the Yale University custom to yell "Frisbie" when throwing a pie tin. In the '40s, when plastic emerged, the pie-tin game was recognized as a marketable product.
