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[AUG. 5,
2004]
As the dog
days of summer are soon approaching, what better time to ask where
all of those great summertime inventions came from. You know -- the
things that make summer what it is, like baseball, ice cream and
swimming.
The staff and I here at Invention
Mysteries World Headquarters, just south of Quincy, decided to dig
up some evidence about the origins of our favorite summertime
inventions. Here's what we came up with:
The origin of ice cream is uncertain,
but it was probably invented in China approximately 4,000 years ago
-- I think it was on a Wednesday around 2 p.m. Fast forward to the
1600s, when King Charles I of England enjoyed ice cream on a regular
basis, freshly prepared by his chef. In fact, Charles had his chef
keep the recipe a secret.
After he was beheaded in 1649 (Charles
I of England, not the chef, because they usually don't do that to
chefs), the chef let the cat out of the bag. Ice cream's U.S.
origins began in the 1700s, when a very successful inventor named
Thomas Jefferson (yes, that Thomas Jefferson) introduced it
to America.
Nancy Johnson developed the first
hand-crank ice cream maker in 1847. She received a patent for it and
sold her rights to William Young for $200, which was pretty good
money in those days. Young named the machine after the inventor,
calling it the "Johnson Patent Ice-Cream Freezer."
The ice cream cone could have been
invented by any of a number of different ice cream vendors; the only
thing we know for sure is that it first became popular at the
World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904.
The rules to America's pastime were
created by bank clerk Alexander Cartwright, although he may have
loosely based his version of the game on an earlier version by
Nelson Doubleday. Doubleday, who fired the first shot in defense of
the Union during the Civil War, was long credited for inventing the
game of baseball. The modern baseball glove was invented by
Cardinals pitcher Bill Doak and licensed to Rawlings Sporting Goods
in 1919. More than 100 years would pass before the Cubs would win
another World Series (trust me on this one).
Nearly every major league sports team
has a Gatorade cooler near the bench. Gatorade was invented in 1965
by Dr. Robert Cade, a medical researcher at the University of
Florida. One of the school's football coaches wanted something to
help keep his players performing well in the hot weather, so he
asked the team doctor, who worked with Dr. Cade, for help.
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After trying a number of different
formulas, they came up with what became known as Gatorade. Why
"Gatorade"? The school's team name is the Gators. Sales of Gatorade
took off when the football team won their first Orange Bowl in 1967,
and the sports drink now rings up billions of dollars in sales each
year. Incidentally, Cade had offered the school the rights to his
Gatorade patent, but it turned him down. Big mistake.
What would summer be without swimming?
The inventor of the bikini, Louis Reard, named it after the Bikini
Islands in the Pacific Ocean in 1945, near the end of World War II.
You would think that he came up with the name after seeing women
wearing the little two-piece swimsuit there, but that's not the
case. It's a mystery why he named it the bikini, but it may have had
something to with a major event that happened there -- the explosion
of the world's first nuclear bomb nearby.
The bikini led to the need for
sunscreen, which was invented by Miami Beach pharmacist Benjamin
Green in 1944, who created it to protect soldiers serving in the
South Pacific. Green brewed his successful formula of cocoa butter
and jasmine on his wife's stove and, being bald, he tested it on his
own head. The sunscreen that he developed became known as
Coppertone.
Green had competition, though, when
25-year-old high school teacher and part-time lifeguard Ron Rice
concocted his own natural tanning formula of coconut, avocado, kukui
and other secret natural oils in his garage and named it Hawaiian
Tropic. Rice began selling Hawaiian Tropic in 1969 on the beaches of
Florida. That sounds like the perfect summer job!
Next week,
we'll reveal the origins of the different sports being played in the
Summer Olympics, which begin next weekend in Greece.
[Paul
Niemann]
Invention Mysteries is written each
week by Paul Niemann, whose favorite summertime invention is the
game of baseball. He can be reached at
niemann7@inventionmysteries.com.
© Copyright Paul Niemann 2004
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