History Made Every Day™

Dymaxion House

If you visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, you can see a prototype of architect/engineer R. Buckminster Fuller's 1945 Dymaxion House: a round aluminum house that could be mass-produced, was storm- and earthquake-proof, and was amazingly energy-efficient. The word "Dymaxion" came from an advertising executive who combined some of Fuller's favorite words: "dynamic," "maximum," and "tension."

Only one Dymaxion House was ever occupied. However, Fuller built a number of corrugated-steel Dymaxion Deployment Units that housed U.S. Army troops in Alaska, the Middle East, and New Jersey.

1986 AMERICAN HOME

In 1957, the agriculture corporation Montsanto built a House of the Future at Disneyland. According to its designers, the House of the Future would show visitors what the typical American home would look like in 1986. The exhibit introduced a few gadgets, like the microwave oven and the wall-mounted TV set, that eventually became quite popular; others, like the atomic food preserver and the ultrasonic dishwasher, were less enduring. In 2008, Disney announced plans to modernize and reopen the attraction.

ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES

Electric appliances were all the rage in the 1920s. Electric coffee pots, waffle makers, washing machines, toasters, fans, and irons all made housekeeping much more efficient—and more pleasant. And thanks to these gadgets, homemakers had much more free time than they'd ever had before.

THE FLAPPER

Some people say that the term "flapper" refers to the oversized rubber galoshes that became popular rainy-day footwear among fashionable young women in the 1920s. Left rakishly unfastened, the boots made a flapping sound as the women walked. No matter where the word came from, it soon became a popular way to describe the independent, fun-loving young women with short skirts and bobbed hair who were, for many Americans, the perfect symbol of the "Roaring 20s."

THE ZIPPER

The man who designed the zipper we still use today, Chicago inventor Whitcomb Judson, came up with the idea while trying to craft a replacement for the cumbersome long shoelaces used to fasten men's and women's boots in the late 19th century. In August 1893 he patented this "clasp-locker." No one paid much attention to the gadget until 1914, when a Swedish engineer named Gideon Sundback made it much more useful by figuring out how to prevent it from getting caught as it zipped up and down. After that, the zipper was everywhere!

THE UMBRELLA

Hollow umbrella handles have long been a place where clever sneaks and spies concealed secret gadgets, guns, swords, poison pellets, rolled-up photographs and top-secret documents. (Meanwhile, James Bond's umbrella hid lethally sharp spikes in its folds.) But umbrella handles can also hold more innocuous objects: for example, collectors have tracked town umbrellas and parasols that hide drinking cups, snuff boxes, and ladies' compacts.

The earliest umbrellas were religious symbols: ancient Egyptian noblemen carried them to show their authority and proximity to the gods. Likewise, the ancient Greeks associated the gadget with the god Bacchus.

THE CORKSCREW

Early corkscrews weren't just used for wine. People stored beer and other beverages, food and preserves, liquid medicines, and even cosmetics in corked containers, too. Clever blacksmiths figured out a way to adapt wine corkscrews to these different purposes (usually by building smaller, more delicate versions of the tool that were easy for anyone to use).

The earliest corkscrews resembled a tool called a bulletscrew or gun worm, a heavy wire twisted into a spiral that soldiers used to pry stuck bullets and caked dirt out of the barrels of their rifles and muskets. By the early 17th century, blacksmiths had discovered that they could use these tools for a pleasanter task, too: extracting the cork stoppers that kept wine in newfangled glass bottles from going bad.