1948 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

Soviet chess master Mikhail Botvinnik wins the world title that he will hold until 1957, regain the following year, and then hold until 1960 (see 1946).

Clue (initially Cluedo) is introduced by the British firm Waddington's, whose management has acquired the board game from Birmingham law clerk Anthony E. Pratt, now 48, who invented it 5 years ago (with some help from his wife, who designed the nine-room layout) while serving as a fire warden at Leeds. Pratt's Colonel Mustard, Dr. Black, Professor Plum, Mrs. Peacock, and Mr. Green will have other names in some foreign versions of the game, which within 50 years will have sold 150 million copies.

Scrabble is copyrighted December 1 by Newtown, Conn., sheep raiser James Brunot, who has agreed to pay small royalties to the inventor of the "crossword game" played with wooden tiles on a board. His Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-born friend Alfred M. (Mosher) Butts, now 48, was an unemployed architect when he designed the game in 1931, calling it Lexiko (his wife, Nina, was better at it than he was). Butts found that other games depended basically on luck or, like chess, were too high-brow for most people; his Lexiko game had no board, players received scores based on the length of the words they formed, they got extra points for using the letters B, F, H, M, P, V, W, and Y, even more for using J, K, Q, X, or Z, and Butts reduced the number of S tiles to four because they made the game too easy. Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and the publishing house Simon & Schuster all rejected his idea, and by August 1934 he had sold only 84 games, all by word of mouth. His $127.03 in receipts fell short of his $147.46 in expenses, but Butts kept at it, adding a board in 1938, assigning values to letters depending on their frequency of use, making certain squares on the board double- or triple-value squares, increasing the number of tiles from 100 to 110, and renaming the game Criss-Cross. Brunot has made some minor changes in Butts's game, registers the name Scrabble as a trademark December 16, retires from his day job with a New York City welfare agency, and begins manufacturing Scrabble sets at the rate of a few dozen per week (see 1952).

Velcro (from the French words velours and crochet) has its beginnings as Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral, 41, walks in the woods with his dog, is struck by the ability of burrs to fasten themselves to his wool clothing and his dog's coat, places a burr under a microscope, and sees that its barbed, hook-like seed pods mesh neatly with the looped fibers of his clothing. De Mestral will develop Velcro brand hook-and-loop fasteners that will be used for many items in lieu of buttons or slide fasteners.

Christian Dior's "New Look" catches on worldwide with women eager to abandon the square, mannish, waistless shapes of past decades, but some critics protest the profligate use of fabric in light of persistent world shortages (see 1947).

New York fashion designer Anne Klein (née Hannah Golofsky), 25, joins with her husband, Ben, to form Junior Sophisticates, a new Seventh Avenue firm for which she creates a dress plus jacket. Having won a scholarship to Traphagen School, she began her career as a freelance design sketcher at age 15, abhors frills, and will go on to design the A-line dress and long, pleated, plaid skirts with blazers (see 1968).

New York fashion designer Hannah Troy (née Stern), 47, introduces the short-waisted "petite" size. She has noticed in a California May Company store that women were pulling at their shoulders and waistlines because the dresses they were trying on did not fit properly. After studying measurements of women volunteers for the WACS and WAVES in World War II, she has concluded from the statistics that women are typically short-waisted, whereas most fashions are designed for long-waisted women.

Dial soap is the world's first deodorant soap; introduced by Chicago's Armour and Co., it employs the bacteria-killing chemical hexachlorophene discovered in World War II.

Kitty Litter is introduced by Cassopolis, Mich., coal, ice, and sawdust merchant Edward Lowe, 27, who has joined his family's business after a stint in the navy. His neighbor Kaye Draper has found her sandpile frozen solid in January; unable to fill her cat box, she has tried ashes, but they left paw prints all over her house. Lowe has been trying to sell Fuller's Earth (kiln-dried granulated clay) to local poultry raisers as nesting material but has had little success. He suggests that Draper try it, and she finds the clay granules even better than sand. Lowe arranges with a local pet shop to offer five-pound paper bags labeled "Kitty Litter" at 65¢, the shop finds no buyers (sand costs only a penny per pound), Lowe tells the retailer to give the product away, and when users come back asking for more he starts visiting other pet shops and attending cat shows nationwide to promote the product. Cats cover up their droppings in an instinctive effort to conceal them from possible predators; owners have provided them with sawdust, wood shavings, and sand, but most have left their pets out of doors because of their odors. Kitty Litter will help increase the popularity of cats as house pets and Lowe will build a company that he will sell for more than $200 million plus stock options in 1990 (see 1995).