SANDY KOZEL

Walter Matthau, left,  and Art Carney on Broadway in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.

Neil Simon Broadway play The Odd Couple debuted in 1965
and starred Walter Matthau (who would go to play the same
role in the film) and Art Carney as Felix Ungar. Matthau won
a Tony award for his portrayal, one of a slew of accolades
the play received.

On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received
a patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone.

World War II restrictions cut deep into every American pantry as
federal officials announced that sliced bread would be rationed
on this day in history, Jan. 18, 1943.

"I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to
the morale and saneness of a household," distraught mother
Sue Forrester of Fairfield, Connecticut, claiming to speak on
behalf of America’s housewives, lamented in a New York Times
letter to the editor.

Wartime rationing had already caused severe restrictions on
the nation’s household food supply. 

Basic resources were devoted in ever-growing volume to the
war effort in 1943, as the tide of battle turned and the U.S. and
its Allies went on the offensive across the vast expanse of two
oceans.

Bread rationing marked the depths of sacrifices on the home
front. 

Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa invented the
first single loaf bread-slicing machine. A prototype he built
in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, and it was not until 1928
that Rohwedder had a fully working machine ready. The
first commercial use of the machine was by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, who sold their
first slices on July 7, 1928.

By 1933, around 80% of bread sold in the US was pre-sliced,
leading to the popular idiom "greatest thing since sliced
bread"

Otto Frederick Rohwedder
(July 7, 1880 – November 8, 1960)

This photograph depicts a "new electrical bread
slicing machine" in use by an unnamed bakery
in St. Louis in 1930.

On December 28, 1895, the world’s first commercial movie
screening took place at the Grand Café in Paris. The film
was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French
brothers who developed a camera-projector called the
Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their
invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film
showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory (above).

On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened
a series of short scenes from everyday French life and
charged admission for the first time.

The  Garand Café in Paris.

The Lumiere Brothers

The Lumiere Cinematographe.

Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph
in 1877.       

Edison stumbled on one of his great inventions—the phonograph—
while working on a way to record telephone communication at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His work led him to
experiment with a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his
surprise, played back the short song he had recorded, “MARY
HAD A LITTLE LAMB”. Public demonstrations of the phonograph
made the Yankee inventor world famous, and he was dubbed the
“Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931)