21st August

Today was the day, in 1858, when General Sam Browne (he of the Cavalry) designed a brilliant new sword belt. He'd lost an arm during the Indian Mutiny of the previous year and found drawing his sword difficult because swords were slung by two loose straps from a waist belt. The 'Sam Browne' carried a sword frog that held the weapon close to the hip and could be drawn with one hand.
They don't make them like that any more.

In other news ...
The first Cadillac, the Rolls-Royce of American car design, appeared today in 1902. It had so many additional features ((four wheels, steering wheel, doors etc) that they immediately wrote a song about it - Knick Knack Cadillac.

17th March

Gottleib Daimler was born today in 1834. He was one of the many pioneers of the motor car and aren't we all  grateful that cars were named after their inventors' surnames rather than Christian names, otherwise we'd have had, along with the fabulous Gottleibs, Henrys, Charleses, Karls, Andre-Gustaves and Edsels ... oh, wait a minute, there really was an Edsel.

You take my point.

In other news ...
It's one of those irritating pub quiz questions; who invented the elastic band? The answer is Stephen Perry, who was born today in 1845. One wonders why he did it. I'd like to think it was to twang bits of screwed up paper around a classroom to annoy his teachers, but it couldn't have been because, looking at his dates, one of them would have (quite rightly) beaten him to death.