MORE ORIGINS OF EVERYDAY THINGS by Pam North There are many everyday objects in our lives that we take for granted, but they weren't always around, and the stories of how they came to be are often even more interesting than the items themselves. Next time you turn on your windshield wipers, be grateful for their convenience and for the ingenuity of an Alabama woman inventor, Mary Anderson. While on a trip to New York City in 1903, she became less focused on the sightseeing and more intrigued with the streetcar conductor who was repeatedly stopping to wipe snow off the windshield. Suddenly inspired, she made a drawing of a device consisting of a lever that activated a swinging arm to mechanically sweep the ice and snow from the windshield. She applied and received a patent the following year, and by 1913, windshield wipers were standard equipment on automobiles. If you like to snack on potato chips, thank Laura Scudder, a southern California businesswoman, for her concept of keeping them fresh. Until the mid-1920s, potato chips were sold in bulk at grocery stores, and scooped out of barrels into paper bags for customers. When the supply got low, the chips at the bottom of the barrel were usually broken and stale. Scudder came up with the idea of ironing a piece of waxed paper on three sides to form a bag, which was then filled with potato chips and sealed on the fourth side to make it airtight, keeping the chips fresh and intact. While Alexander Graham Bell was the inventor of the telephone, it was his assistant, Thomas Watson, who can be credited with the telephone booth. Because the early version of the telephone demanded shouting into it to be heard, Watson's landlady became upset with all the noise caused by Watson's calls. To stifle the din, Watson threw blankets over some of his furnitute, and crawled underneath them during his phone conversations. By 1883, he had designed an enclosed wooden booth featuring a domed top, screened windows, a writing desk and a ventilator. Those of you who are frequent moviegoers doubtlessly enjoy the diverse offerings of cinema multiplexes, an accidental invention that came about when a theater owner, Stan Durwood, attempted to open a large theater in a Kansas City, Missouri shopping mall in 1963. Two support columns in the building could not be removed to accomodate a single theater, so Durwood had to build two individual smaller theaters instead. At first he showed the same movie on both screens, but eventually it dawned on him that he could sell more tickets by showing two different films. His success got enough publicity to spawn a nation-wide multiplex boom. Black Hawk and Central City abound in slot machines, a draw for those who have a penchant for gambling but who probably have no idea of the origin of the slot machines on which they play. While gambling machines date back as far as the 1890s, it took a vending machine introduced in 1910 by the Mills Novelty Company to really catch on with the public. The machine dispensed gum in cherry, orange and plum flavors, depending on which fruits appeared on a randomly spinning set of three wheels. If three bars with the words "1910 Fruit Gum" appeared in a row, extra gum was given, and if a lemon came up, no gum came out at all (which is where "lemon" became a term for a defective or unsatisfactory product). The popular 1910 Fruit Gum machine was eventually converted from gum to cash payouts, and the same fruit symbols remain on modern slot machines. On the occasions when your path crosses these various everyday objects, have a thought for the ingenuity of those individuals who created them.