Sulfa-thiazole For Me

The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by a Johnson & Johnson employee, Earle Dickson, for his wife who often cut or burned herself while cooking. It was dangerous back then. The prototype allowed her to dress her wounds without assistance. Dickson passed the idea on to his employer, who went on to produce and market the product as the Band-Aid. By 1924, Johnson & Johnson introduced machine-made Band-Aids. Two years later, the iconic tin packaging debuted. Once people used all the contents, the empty tins became popular canisters to hold everything from nails and buttons to marbles and baseball cards. The sale of sterilized Band-Aids began in 1939 with a little red string in the packaging to easily tear it open. 

Today, the Band-Aid brand of adhesive bandages is distributed by the consumer health company Kenvue, spun off from Johnson & Johnson in 2023. The brand has become a generic term for adhesive bandages in many countries. Well over one billion Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages have been produced.

The above illustration is from 1943

Broadcast Pioneers: The NBC Three

Edwin Newman (1919-2010) was an American newscaster, journalist, and author, known for a 23-year career in television news with NBC beginning in 1961. Newman specialized in reporting breaking news, reporting for Republican and Democratic conventions, and as a moderator for Presidential debates. He was also known for his dry wit on and off camera.

Sander Vanocur (1928-2019) was an American television journalist who focused on U.S. national electoral politics, primarily for NBC News and ABC News. He served as White House correspondent and national political correspondent for NBC News in the 1960s and early 1970s. After his service in the United States Army, he began his journalism career as a reporter on the London staff of The Manchester Guardian and also did general reporting for The New York Times.

Garrick Utley (1939-2014) was an American television journalist and reporter, joined NBC News in 1963 as a researcher in Europe for The Huntley-Brinkley Report as a Foreign and Principal correspondent. His reporting on the Vietnam War has the distinction of being the first full-time television correspondent to cover the war on-site. The versatile Utley was also an anchor, frequently substituting for NBC's John Chancellor. 

From left to right above, Edwin Newman, Sander Vanocur, and Garrick Utley

Ignoring The 8th Commandment

 

On this day in 1974, Louis Clark Brock (1939-2020) was named Sportsman of the Year. The El Dorado, Arkansas native began his major league career with the Chicago Cubs in 1961 but spent the majority of his big league career as a left fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals as an outfielder. Brock is best known for his base-stealing record, once the major league career and single-season record-holder. Brock and his wife, Jackie, were both ordained ministers serving at Abundant Life Fellowship Church in St. Louis. 

A Noted Television Composer

 

Patrick Williams (1939-2018) was an American composer, arranger, and conductor who worked in many genres of music for film and television. The Missouri-born Williams grew up in Connecticut and received a degree in history from Duke University. However, music being his first passion, he went on to Columbia University to study music composition and conducting, making a career of just that. His music accompanied episodes of Columbo, every season of Lou Grant, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and Monk among many others. He wrote a great theme with trumpet lead for the Bill Bixby's series, The Magician, and the funk-soul theme to Quinn Martin's The Streets of San Francisco with an unheard of twenty seconds of intro music before the melody and title voice-over begins. With all the extra commercials today, a full theme can be all of twenty seconds long.

Travel The World with View-Master

 

A Portland, Oregon pharmacist, Edwin Mayer, started a photo-finishing business and bought into Sawyer's Photo Finishing Service in 1919 and by 1926 renamed the business Sawyer Service, Inc. The company produced photographic postcards and album sets as souvenirs. Sawyer was the nation's largest producer of scenic postcards in the 1920s.

Introduced at the New York World's Fair in 1939, the View-Master was originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer's, the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding thin, circular cardboard disks. Each disk contained seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film. A lever on the unit would rotate the disk to the next image. The View-Master was an extension of the old two-dimensional cards.

The advent of Kodachrome color film made the use of small high-quality photographic color images practical. Tourist attraction and travel views dominated in View-Master's early lists of 3D  Stereo reels, most of which were meant to be interesting to users of all ages. View-Master's highest-quality viewer, Model D, was available until the early 1970s. Today, children are the View-Master's main sales target. 

Note: Shown above is Model C, made of bakelite and produced from 1946-55. My father had one. It is in my possession. 

School Bus Closeup

 

Originally called National School Bus Chrome, the yellow used on school buses was specifically formulated for use in North America in 1939 by Dr. Frank W. Cyr, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. His conference established national school bus construction standards for the US including the standardized yellow color. Yellow was chosen because it attracts attention and is noticed quickly in peripheral vision, faster than any other color according to scientific research at the time. National School Bus Glossy Yellow is the current official designation.