For The First Time (or the last time)

After 20 years of pressure from activists who found their symbol offensive, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has decided to do...

Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small ma...

For most of early telephone history, calls were completed by young men and women working at the phone company central office, where they use...

We'll be away for a bit of relaxation and recharging. New posts will resume on 2/26. If you miss me, you can read all of the posts on al...

The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in 1923, and the first feature-length movie originally pre...

Harvard University on Sunday named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president, ending a lengthy and secretive search. The sev...

Mr. Potato Head started as a breakfast cereal premium, developed by New York inventor George Lerner. Just before 1950, he designed and produ...

Until the mid 1960's, most American men had their hair cut in barber shops, and most American women had their hair "done" or ...

Despite its overwhelming success with the iPod and iTunes, Apple has never achieved a big share of the personal computer market. According t...

Compaq is now the low-end brand name used by H-P, but Compaq Computer Corporation has in important place in PC history. Compaq was founded i...

Many people think that clam strips are cut away from the yucky parts of "whole belly" soft shell clams , that are commonly used fo...

People have been eating breakfast sandwiches (lox on a bagel, egg on a roll) for a very long time. But the notion of a portable morning meal...

According to marker research firm IDC, the worldwide cellphone market reached a new milestone in 2006, with more than one billion phones sol...

The 8-track cartridge was a magnetic tape format, popular for music from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. It was created by Bill Lear (the...

While watching through a window as a janitor cleaned behind some electrically-operated games in a penny arcade, Connecticut inventor Harvey ...

Florence Ellinwood Allen (1884 - 1966) majored in music at Western Reserve University, then studied piano in Berlin while also working as a...

In 1968, the Big Mac burger became available in the whole McDonald's chain, after being invented by Jim Delligatti, one of the first McD...

Chewing gum causes problems in Singapore, apparently much bigger problems than elsewhere. In 1983 a gum ban was proposed because of problems...

Japanese construction company Kongo Gumi, which was founded in 578 by a family from the ancient Korean kingdom of Baekje, went into liquidat...

In the 1990s, AT&T (the real one, not the current one that used to be called SBC) wanted to sell phone gear to long distance companies l...