Category: Development
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The Laying On of Hands for Fingerprints
In 1919, “The fingerprints of every sailor and soldier serving the United States are on record… In Argentina it is true of every civilian. In time it may be true of all the world.” Indeed. By 2009, the FBI had 63 million fingerprints on file. Their database started in 1924, just five years after this article […]
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Why Suffrage Fight Took 50 Years
If the constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was first introduced in 1878, why didn’t it pass Congress until 1919? Four major reasons: women’s minds had to be changed, so did men’s, politics, and money. 1.) Women’s minds had to be changed. In the beginning of the movement the entire world, including women, […]
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Magna Charta of Childhood
World War I changed how many governments viewed their responsibilities toward children. While previously they had largely kept their hands off, the war took a huge toll on children’s health, child labor, and education. Governments felt more of a need to step in. In the U.S., what did the government do around this time? Congress […]
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Channel Tunnel After a Hundred Years of Talk
In 1919, a tunnel under the English Channel “has been brought much nearer to practical realization.” It wouldn’t be opened until 1994. Supposedly early 1919 had all the elements going for construction, now that World War I had recently ended: Generally speaking, however, it is taken as an accepted fact that opposition to the tunnel […]
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Bobbed Hair and Maiden Names for Wives!
Reporting on a 1919 meeting of the Women’s Freedom Congress used the headline “bobbed hair and maiden names for wives!”– exclamation point and all. …an impassioned please by Fola La Follette that all women retain their maiden names after marriage. Miss La Follette, who has retained her individuality by refusing to be known by the […]
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Peace Taking Over War’s Inventions
Several months after World War I ended, technological innovations produced for the conflict were being repurposed for peacetime uses. Take this sound pinpointer, used to calculate where distant enemy weapons were located. This same invention could also be used for bridges. One thing about bridges that has puzzled engineers up to this time is some […]
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Memorial Temple Under Way in Washington
What went wrong with the planned National Victory Memorial Building? The hall with a 7,000 seat auditorium inside was intended for Washington D.C., at the site of what is now the west building of the National Gallery of Art. The structure was intended to be completely separate from the Washington Monument, even though it was originally […]
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Winged Warfare and the League of Nations
100 years ago this week, the the League of Nations was agreed to at the Paris Peace Conference. Formally launching a year later in January 1920, the League was tasked with setting laws and norms for the increasingly international post-WWI world order. In 1919, former Assistant U.S. Attorney General Charles Warren discussed all the intricacies […]
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Putting the Airplane to Peacetime Uses
The development of the airplane, first invented in 1903, truly took off as a result of World War I. In January 1919, after the war, what should be the purpose of airplanes? This prediction largely ended up coming true: Some of the practical men even go so far as to say that a perfectly developed […]
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Insignia, Not Black Gowns, as War Mourning
Women in America had long worn all black to represent widowhood as a result of a husband dying in war. This 1918 article even noted that “There are now women who have been in black ever since the civil war.” But that began to change during WWI. Women began wearing a three-inch black band sleeve […]
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