History

"The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish," wrote W.M. Thackeray a hundred years ago; and to this day, pipe smoking retains a certain connotation of sophistication. The hoi polloi may take their tobacco by cigarette or cigar, but a true connoisseur of the brown leaf wouldn't think of any means of fumigation aside from the pipe. Perhaps the veneration of pipe smoking stems partly from its long popularity, for centuries in Europe, the pipe was virtually the only means of tobacco smoking.  read more »

At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, two recent American inventions were placed on public display for the first time. One, a certain voice-transmission apparatus invented by a man named Alexander Graham Bell attracted widespread attention among the fairgoers. The second, called the typewriter, attracted almost none. Yet by the time of the American Bicentennial Celebration, the typewriter had become such an integral part of American life that it's hard to imagine how business was carried on without it, just 100 years ago.  read more »

Imagine a vast network of streetcar lines connecting America's cities, with trolley cars whisking passengers between neighboring towns at speeds of seventy or eighty miles an hour. A prospect for the distant future? No, a fairly accurate description of American interurban travel around the turn of this century. Yes, that's right, we said trolley cars!  read more »

"Preposterous!" scoffed American tycoon Russell Sage to the first proposal for an underground transit system in New York City. "The people of New York will never go into a hole in the ground to ride."

Well, as everyone knows, Russell's counsel turned out to be less than sage. By the time of his death in 1906, subway cars were already rattling through Manhattan's first tunnel, with work proceeding on new lines in three boroughs. And every year, close to two billion people "go into a hole to ride" in New York City.  read more »

The vast legions of American ice cream-lovers fall basically into two camps: those who favor chocolate, and those who champion its chromatic antithesis, vanilla. Although vanilla and chocolate, long the most popular ice cream flavors in the United States, may be diametrically opposed on the color scale, they share more in common than you might imagine.  read more »

Let us now turn to the subject of brolliology. What is brolliology? Why, it's the study of the brolly, of course, the gamp, the parasol, the parapluie, the bumbershoot, the bumbersoll, to you, the umbrella. Which brings us to the History of the Umbrella.  read more »

To many minds, the tulip and the windmill are virtually synonymous with the Netherlands. Most historians would agree that the windmill in Europe made its first appearance in the Low Countries, sometime before the twelfth century. But you may be surprised to learn that the tulip is not a native of Holland, and was totally unknown in that country until the sixteenth century.  read more »

The scene: winter in a wooded area of southern France. A group of farmers moves among the trees, following the meanderings of a half-dozen pigs. Suddenly, one of the pigs noses into the dirt, grunting and snorting in hungry anticipation, and begins to dig into the ground with its hooves. The farmers rush over and chase the animal, then complete the excavation job. Yes, they're searching for buried treasure, but what kind? They're hunting for the most expensive natural food in the world: truffles.  read more »

"I believe," wrote Alexander Graham Bell in 1878, "that in the future wires will unite the head offices of the Telephone Company in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place. I am aware that such ideas may appear to you Utopian."  read more »

Step into a modern shoe store and take a look around. High-heeled and platform shoes, boots, sandals, moccasins, wooden-heeled clogs, quite a variety for today's shopper. Recent fashions? Well, not one of the footwear styles you see today is less than 400 years old! The History of Shoes is indeed interesting.  read more »