3: Refrigerator">

Refrig­er­a­tors
Edited from Wikipedia
Before the inven­tion of the refrig­er­a­tor, ice­houses were used to pro­vide cool stor­age for most of the year. Placed near fresh­wa­ter lakes or packed with snow and ice dur­ing the win­ter, they were once very com­mon. In fact, using nature to cool food is still com­mon today: on moun­tain­sides, runoff from melt­ing snow higher up is a con­ve­nient way to cool drinks, and dur­ing the win­ter months sim­ply plac­ing one’s milk out­side one’s win­dow is suf­fi­cient to greatly extend its use­ful life.
In the 11^th cen­tury, the Per­sian physi­cist and …

2: Starbucks">

In honor of this really cool place I blog in every Sat­ur­day, I am fea­tur­ing Star­bucks this week.

Star­bucks
Edited from Wikipedia

The orig­i­nal Star­bucks was opened in Pike Place Mar­ket in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton, in 1971 by three part­ners: Eng­lish teacher Jerry Bald­win, his­tory teacher Zev Siegel, and writer Gor­don Bowker. In the begin­ning, they sold high-quality cof­fee beans and cof­fee brew­ing equipment.

Entre­pre­neur Howard Schultz joined the com­pany in 1983, and, after a trip to Milan, Italy, advised that the com­pany sell cof­fee and espresso drinks as well as beans. The own­ers rejected this idea, believ­ing that get­ting into the bev­er­age busi­ness would dis­tract the com­pany from its pri­mary focus. To them, cof­fee was some­thing to be pre­pared in the home. Cer­tain that there was much money to be made sell­ing drinks to on-the-go Amer­i­cans, Schultz started the Il Gior­nale cof­fee bar chain in 1985.

1: KFC">

I am start­ing a new cat­e­gory. I call it “The Ori­gins of Ordi­nary Things.”

Life has a way of desen­si­tiz­ing us so that we no longer notice what we encounter, expe­ri­ence, and come across every day. Places, things, per­sons are grad­u­ally taken for granted and we lose our inter­est in them because they’re “always there”. They become ordinary.

The Ori­gins of Ordi­nary Things aim to cap­ture the inter­est­ing story behind what we encounter every­day; because if their story is told, life ceases to be ordinary.

Have you ever won­dered how Star­bucks began? Or why we call the shoe brand Nike? Or maybe who invented this won­der­ful thing called a refrig­er­a­tor? Or maybe who started blog­ging (was it really Doo­gie Howser MD?!)? I will write about the extra­or­di­nary sto­ries of these seem­ingly ordi­nary things.