NEW YEAR! NEW BLOG!

I'm upgrading! A New Year, A New Blog! Here, I hope to share items of interest as I work to finish my novel. 2010 proved to be a key year for me. Several of my short stories were published on Angie's Diary, an e-magazine. Finally, I see my dream coming into the light, and I am very excited. A newfound confidence is slowly building my courage. The privilege to watch so many new friends grow in their success, and aspiring writers jumping on the bandwagon to fulfill their dreams, spurs me on! I hope you enjoy the journey with me.





My novel is set in the 1920's. It's a romance with a touch of mystery, based on the grandfather I never knew. Writing this novel has allowed me to find out so many things about him and the family I never knew existed. However, doing research about life in the 1920's gave me more insight into life, as it was, back then. I'd like to share that with you.



DID YOU KNOW THE RADIO WAS INVENTED IN 1920?




A series of dots and dashes, transmitted by inefficient machines is all radio transmissions consisted of before 1920. A Swedish-American engineer, Ernest Alexanderson is credited with inventing the present-day radio/television transmission. It took rigourous experimentation and hard work, but he invented a high frequency alternator for the first time with which transmission of radio waves became highly successful. He also invented a scanning disk and high-frequency neon lamps for television transmission. All this happened just a mere 90 years ago. It's amazing how technology has developed so fast and in such a short amount of time. No other century has this kind of speedy growth. When I was writing about my character I tried to
imagine her without the modern technologies we enjoy today. Fashion exploded into a new modern era for women and the amazing transformations since has been extraordinary to say the least.



HOW ABOUT HAIR DRYERS?



Believe it or not, women used to blow-dry their hair by inserting a flexible pipe in the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. The first hair dryer was invented in 1920. I'm told the machine over-heated easily, but, of course, it was better than using a vacuum cleaner! Quite a contraption! I remember my mother telling me they use to curl their hair with strips of cloth tied in their hair. In the morning, they would have lovely curls. They had to untie them and shake them out, of course. I can't imagine a woman's husband being too exited coming to bed with his wife's hair all tied up in knots!! A far cry from our convenient steam rollers, curling irons, and flat irons. Aren't we girls lucky?

AND OF COURSE, YOU KNOW THE STORY OF THE INVENTION OF THE BAND-AID!

It seems Josephine Dickson loved being married, and tried her best to be a good homemaker to husband Earle Dickson. However, cooking was not her forte. After arriving home every evening for dinner to find his wife's fingers cut and injured, he finally devised a solution, a piece of tape with a small sized gauze in the middle. He placed this device on his wife's injured fingers. He began to sell these primitive bandges. Four years later Johnson & Johnson bought the rights from their employee, Mr. Dickson, massed produced them and called them "Band-Aids". The best is history.

I hope you've enjoyed these little tid-bits from the 1920's and hope you will tune in next week for more interesting facts from that era. I'm off to edit the next chapter of my novel!!