50s
Inventing The Credit Card
RETRO
Diners Club, the world’s first credit card, was used for the first time at Major’s Cabin Grill in New York City on February 8th, 1950. Perhaps at odds with the debonair image the company went on to cultivate, the first iteration was made of cardboard, and required three signatories. Frank X McNamara claimed to have …
Preventing Technological Surprise
RETRO
Inventing the internet and pioneering satellite navigation, U.S. government agency DARPA has had an illustrious history since being founded by President Eisenhower (as the Advanced Research Projects Agency) on February 7th, 1958. Created in response to the Soviets launching Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, its mission, which continues to this day, is ‘to prevent …
Lego Shifts To Plastic
RETRO
Stud-and-tube bricks, which paved the way for Lego to become one of the most successful companies in Denmark, were patented on 28th January, 1958. But this family business had already been in existence for 26 years, mostly making wooden toys. It later emerged, however, that the plastic self-locking bricks that brought them so much success …
Joyce Brothers, $64,000 Swot
RETRO
A female contestant had never scooped the jackpot on an American TV quiz show before New York psychologist Dr Joyce Brothers won $64,000 on 6th December, 1955. Her specialist subject was boxing – a topic about which she knew little, until she devoted herself to studying the annals of the sport in preparation for multiple …