You’ve seen ads for watches, right?  Online, in magazines, in newspapers (remember newspapers?)  Generally you get a good view of the watch, with its face showing, maybe its band, and… and maybe something else.  They’re selling watches, so what else is there to notice? One thing to notice is, of course, the time. The watch likely won’t be correct, since it’s just a photograph, but have you ever noticed what time it is in the ads? It’s always 10:10, or close to it.  Almost always, anyway. Go ahead and do a search for watch ads online.  Rummage through the old copies of The Saturday Evening Post and Life magazine stored in your grandparents’ basement.  It’s almost eerie, but it’s true: watches in ads almost always read 10:10.  This is an advertising convention dating way back, at least to 1926, when the Hamilton Watch Company started favoring this time.  Rolex picked up on it later on, and now it’s pretty much the standard time setting in al...

Maybe it’s true that you never know you love someone until you start complaining about them.  If that’s so, then Gary Dahl drew the wrong conclusion from his friends he heard complaining about their pets.  It was 1975, and not only had we put a man on the moon, we’d also invented the 8-track cassette.  So why couldn’t we invent a way to make walking, washing, feeding and grooming our pets easier?  Why couldn’t technology catch up? Dahl was no scientist or engineer, so there wasn’t much he could do to develop technology.  But he was in advertising, which requires a different kind of creativity.  Instead of innovative machines, advertisers’ skills run more toward a field of human endeavor that probably predates machines by millennia: getting people interested in something they neither want nor need.  But what could Gary do? The solution, he figured, was to create a better pet.  At least, to create a lower-maintenance pet for our busy, deman...

The process of puffing grain is a very old one.  The oldest known examples were discovered by archaeologists in New Mexico.  This earliest puffed grain was popcorn, which has been around for at least 4,000 years.  Early popcorn was smaller than what we know today, with a popped piece roughly the diameter of a US penny. Other grains were never really puffed until much more recently.  The next puffed grain to appear was invented in 1901 by Dr. Alexander P. Anderson.  Dr. Anderson experimented with grains of corn starch, exposing them to heat and pressure in test tubes.  He heated these grains in an oven, and later cracked them, which caused them to explode into small puffs.  This was the invention of puffed cereal, which would be introduced to the world at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, billed as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”. Sure, it’s grain—now with air! Since Dr. Anderson’s invention, puffed cereals have become a standard in th...