Automatic elevators existed by around 1900, yet many riders still wanted a human operator. In September 1945 a strike by about 15,000 New York building service workers stranded roughly 1.5 million office workers and pushed buildings toward automation....

Leo Fender ran a radio repair shop in Fullerton, California. He designed the Telecaster, the Precision Bass and the Stratocaster, but he never learned to play the guitar. Musicians tested his prototypes for him. #LeoFender #Stratocaster #Telecaster #GuitarHistory...

Around 1900, about a third of US motor vehicles were electric, and Ferdinand Porsche's very first car, the 1898 P1, was fully electric. Cheap Texas oil, the Ford Model T and the electric starter pushed them off the...

From the 1920s to the 1950s, thousands of US shoe stores used shoe-fitting fluoroscopes, X-ray machines that let customers, often children, watch their toe bones wiggle inside new shoes. By the 1940s there were about 10,000 of them....

In 1943 Richard James, an engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, was working on springs to keep ship instruments steady in rough seas. One fell and kept walking. His wife Betty named it Slinky, and at a Gimbels...