History of the Monopoly board game (1930’s)

The oldest known version of the game called Monopoly, handmade by Charles Darrow, is in the Strong Museum in Rochester

Charles B. Darrow invented the Monopoly game. Or did he? It was 1934, the height of the Great Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, took what he called the MONOPOLY board game to the executives at Parker Brothers. Like many other Americans, Charles Darrow was unemployed at the time. They soundly rejected the…

Crack is cheap, easy to get, and highly addictive. It emerged in the mid-1980’s as the popular drug of choice because it was easy and inexpensive to manufacture, making it readily available and cheap. In a 1986 Gallup poll, Americans listed crack cocaine as the most serious problem in American society.

Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, and Allan Alcorn with their Pong cabinet game

Tracing the origin of video games is difficult since it’s hard to distinguish which game would truly be labeled a “video game”. As early as the late 1940’s, missile defense systems employed by the United States government and run off of large mainframe computers, resembled a video game in both appearance and internal design.

In 1975, jewelry designer Marvin Wernick accompanied a physician friend to an emergency and marveled when his friend applied thermotropic (meaning, changed by temperature) tape to a child’s forehead to take her temperature. Using this same principle, he took a hollow glass shell and filled it with thermotropic liquid crystals. He then attached the glass…

The outgoing, family oriented, car culture society that thrived during the 50’s spawned an explosion of drive-in theaters across the United States, as a car happy generation of patrons sought outdoor movies as a way to enjoy their favorite pastime with their families in the comfort of their own cars.

MDMA or ecstasy (often abbreviated “E” or “X”) was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck chemist Anton Kollisch to create a substance that stopped out-of-control bleeding. By the late 1980’s, ecstasy, the “feel good drug” hit the club scenes in Dallas, Texas. A year later, the hallucinogenic drug had moved overseas and by the mid…

The CB radio was invented in 1945 by Al Gross, the inventor of the walkie-talkie and owner of the Citizens Radio Corporation. The radio became popular with small businesses and blue-collar workers like carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who used the radio as a tool to communicate with coworkers. By 1960, the costs to produce the 23-channel radio…

Vintage Crestworth Atro Lantern Lava Lamp

A lava lamp (or Astro lamp as it was originally known), is a decorative light featuring various colored, oozing blobs of wax that rise and fall in a heated and lighted lamp. Englishman Edward Craven Walker invented the lava lamp in 1963 and the device grew in popularity during the 1960’s psychedelic craze.

14-year-old William Ruppert breaks pole sitting record in front of home

In an era without television and radio, people often looked for means of entertainment outside of the home. Such was the case in The Roaring Twenties with an odd but not new spectacle of “flagpole sitting”.

Zoot suit in Los Angeles Museum of Art from 1942

A zoot suit, or zuit suit, has high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long knee-length coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. It was popularized in the 1930’s and its extravagant nature triggered World War II riots known as the Zoot Suit Riots.