1913 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) is created by a merger at Pittsburgh of three national U.S. war-veteran societies founded in 1899, soon after the Spanish-American War. Open to any active or honorably discharged male officer or enlisted man who is a U.S. citizen and has served "in any foreign war, insurrection or expedition, which service shall be recognized by the authorization or the issuance of a campaign medal" by the military or naval service, the VFW will grow to have more than 10,000 "posts" dedicated to maximizing U.S. military strength, rehabilitating disabled and needy veterans, assisting widows, orphans, and dependents of needy or disabled veterans, and promoting Americanism (see American Legion, 1919).

The first U.S. deck shuffleboard game is played on a hotel court at Daytona, Florida. The game will be popular with elderly retirees.

Pennsylvania makes Mother's Day a state holiday (see Jarvis, 1908; Wilson, 1914).

Hump bobbie pins are introduced by Cincinnati-born inventor-manufacturer Sol Harry Goldberg, 33, who has devised "humps" for hairpins to help them grip the hair and has founded the Hump Hairpin Manufacturing Co.

Clorox Co. has its beginnings in the Electro-Aquiline Co. founded May 3 at Oakland, Calif., where five entrepreneurs—a banker, a wood-and-coal purveyor, a bookkeeper, a lawyer, and a miner invest $100 each to open America's first large-scale liquid-bleach factory. Their plan is to take brine from San Francisco Bay's salt ponds and turn it into sodium hypochlorite bleach, using electrolysis, and they agree in August to pay $3,000 for a plant site; an engineer with a company that supplies equipment for the plant suggests the name Clorox (a combination of chlorine and sodium hydroxide), sketching a diamond-shaped design that the directors immediately register as their trademark. The company will not add another product for 56 years, but by the end of the century it will be a major producer of household products with $4 billion in sales to consumers in more than 110 countries worldwide.

Brillo Manufacturing Corp. is founded by New York lawyer Milton B. Loeb, 26, whose client (a manufacturing jeweler) has developed a way to clean aluminum cooking utensils using steel wool with a special reddish soap that gives the vessels a brilliant shine.

Dishwasher inventor Josephine Cochrane dies after running the Garis-Cochrane Manufacturing Co. for more than 25 years, but the smaller machine it introduces finds little acceptance (see 1886). To wash just one evening's dinner dishes may require the entire contents of a family's hot-water tank, the water in much of the country is too "hard" for soap to create the suds needed for dishwashing, and a poll conducted next year will show that most women actually enjoy washing dishes as a relaxing chore at day's end. Cochrane's company will change hands several times before being acquired in 1926 by Hobart Co., which will produce the Kitchenaid dishwasher, but few homes will have such machines for another 40 years.

London police arrest a woman July 15 for wearing a split skirt in Richmond Park.

Swedish-born U.S. inventor Gideon Sundback, 33, develops the first dependable slide fastener and efficient machines to manufacture it commercially (see Judson, 1893). He attaches matching metal locks to a flexible backing, each tooth being a tiny hook that engages with an eye under an adjoining hook on an opposite tape. He will patent improvements on his slide fastener in 1917 and assign the patents to the Hookless Fastener Co., founded this year at Meadville, Pa. It will manufacture the Talon slide fastener, but it will be another 30 years before the slide fastener replaces buttons on men's trousers and most other items (see "zipper," 1926).

The Sorbet dress is introduced by Paris fashion designer Paul Poiret, who tours America with a group of models (see 1912). A widespread interest in Russian ballet and Far Eastern art has inspired him to add draped and belted knee-length tunics to his hobble skirt His evening gowns come in bright shades of blue, green, orange, purple, and red, and he tops the flowing Greek lines of his costumes with fringed and tasseled capes, multicolored feathers, and white-fox stoles to give them a flamboyant, theatrical look, accessorizing them also with coils of pearls. Poiret collaborates briefly with St. Petersburg-born costume designer and fashion illustrator Romain de Tirtoff, 30, who came to Paris last year and calls himself Erté, a name based on the French mispronunciation of his initials R. T.

Coco Chanel pioneers sportswear for women at a new boutique in Deauville that features berets and open-necked shirts in an age when women of fashion adorn themselves with feathers and huge hats. Now 30, Gabrielle Chanel gained her nickname at age 20 while entertaining the 10th Light Horse Regiment in the small garrison town of Moulins, became a Paris milliner while mistress to Etienne Balsan, and is now mistress to English businessman Arthur Capel; her lovers will include England's second duke of Westminster, who owns 17 Rolls-Royces and has mammoth greenhouses where pears and peaches ripen all year round, and she will make sweaters the fashion of the rich as Chanel knitwear gains world fame (see 1926; Chanel No. 5 perfume, 1921).

Milan's fashion house Prada is founded by designer Mario Prada, whose leather goods will gain an international reputation, spawning an empire of men's and women's clothing, eyewear, and cosmetics.

The Casino of Monte Carlo has an historic run of one color. Black comes up 26 times in succession at a roulette wheel August 18, theoretically returning 1.35 billion francs on a 20 franc stake, but gamblers bet so heavily on red that the house wins several million francs for La Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et Cercle des Etrangers à Monte Carlo, whose casino always averages about 125 percent return on invested capital each year.

The Erector Set introduced by the Mysto Manufacturing Co. of New Haven, Conn., will help generations of youngsters build miniature steel bridges, cranes, derricks, and other constructs (see Meccano, 1907). Oregon-born Yale and Olympic track star A. C. (Alfred Carlton) Gilbert, 29, has started the company to produce apparatus for magicians, but the girders and trusses of a power line's suspension towers have inspired him to make cardboard construction pieces and commission a toolmaker to produce a prototype set in steel. Mysto Manufacturing will become the A. C. Gilbert Co. in 1916 and will expand its line to include chemistry sets, meteorological stations, radio kits, and other educational toys (see 1914; Tinkertoy, 1914).