At Fire Station 6, 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, a hand-blown light bulb with a carbon filament hangs from the ceiling over the fire engines. It has been burning, with a few interruptions, since 1901. The Shelby Electric Company of Shelby, Ohio made it in the late 1890s, and someone …
The little plastic square on a bag of bread has a famous origin story. In 1952 an engineer from Yakima, Washington named Floyd Paxton was on a flight and couldn’t close an opened bag of peanuts. He took an expired credit card from his wallet and used a penknife to carve a notch just wide enough for …