How many times have you wondered how ordinary things got their start? For many people, where things come from isn’t all that important, while others seek to know how things got started. Here are a few things that you may not have known the origin of, and a couple might just surprise you.
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| Fuzzy dice came from World War II fighter pilots. Being a fighter pilot during the war was a dangerous and terrifying job, and men looked for any possible way to improve their odds of returning home. One of those methods included placing a pair of dice on the cockpit’s instrument panel with “7” showing for good luck. After the war, fight pilots had more free time and money, and the first thing they did was buy a car. At some point, one of the greasy-haired men remembered the pre-flight routine and hung some dice from his rear-view mirror. Naturally, the practice caught on, and before long everybody had fuzzy dice hanging from their rear-view mirror. |
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| Baby monitors were a direct response to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Before the 1930s, the only way to check on your baby was to either perpetually sit in the room with them, or hope they cried loud enough to be heard over the TV. Then, in 1932, Charles Lindbergh’s son was kidnapped from his upstairs nursery. The resulting ordeal spiraled into over two months of ransom notes, desperate searching, and ultimately the sad, brutal death of Charles Jr. Eugene F. McDonald, President of Zenith radio company, immediately set out to create a system to hear what was going on in his daughter’s room. Before long, “Radio Nurse” hit the market and parents could finally relax. |
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School bathrooms were invented to get parents to start bathing their children. In the 1900s, baths were more of a weekly event, which means kids often showed up to school in less than pristine shape. As people became more educated, the idea of only bathing once a week became — no pun intended — “odious.” So, public schools began installing baths for their students. The idea was that if schools could get kids to bathe regularly, maybe they would go home and make their parents jealous of their cleanliness. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “The bath is a civilizer, and that soap lubricates the rails of progress.” Of course, not everything went smoothly. The transition was easier for men, and men’s bathing products began to emphasize how manly it was to take a shower. Eventually, we figured it out and people decided that bathing at school was good, but bathing at home was even better.
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